Multimedia Car Platform

I was involved in the Multimedia Car Platform (MCP) project while working for The Fantastic Corporation. The project investigated applications of Multimedia Home Platform (MHP) concepts and technologies in the context of mobile, in-car systems.

My main contribution to the MCP was the development of Java software to demonstrate the capabilities of the platform, in particular I developed applications for:

• DAB radio reception
• DVB-T TV reception
• Hotel Reservations
• Mobile Phone integration: outgoing/incoming calls, incoming SMS
• Web browser integration
• Hotel Reservations
• User Profile

The user-interface constraints imposed by the in-car environment made development of these applications particularly interesting: voice recognition and speech synthesis software was used to allow hands-free, non-visual access possible to some applications. Other applications were configured to allow access only when parked. The system also made use of a specialised tactile input device provided by BMW.

In order to access data received via Fantastic's data broadcasting system, I developed the "PushCache": an add-on filter to the W3C Jigsaw web server. The PushCache provides a simple mechanism for inserting data directly into the Jigsaw proxy . Clients send requests for data via the Jigsaw proxy, and obtain "pushed" data in exactly the same way as data downloaded via HTTP. The PushCache code was submitted to the W3C and is now available as part of the current release. See my source code page for details.

MCP Links

Unfortunately, the orginal MCP site is no longer available, however the Wayback Machine has an archived version. Note that this link can sometimes be rather slow.

This article on the Broadcast Engineering Homeplatform site provides a brief overview of the project and shows some screenshots of the demonstrator presented at IFA 2001 trade fair in Berlin.

This PDF presentation by my colleague Gregor Hotz shows more screenshots and provides more information about the MCP Services architecture.

This PDF presentation by Klaus Strohmenger of Nokia describes in more detail the hardware used for the demonstrator.