Audi “Virtual Cockpit”
|Audi have been known for doing some high tech things over the years, and this is no exception.

Audi have tried to reinvent the wheel, well behind the wheel but its close enough. Even though Audi have decided to add tech to probably the only remaining analogue part of the car. This addition is probably not revolutionary but its cool.
The hardware of the “virtual cockpit” is actually quite good. The screen is 12.3 inches at a resolution of 1440×540, thats 125 PPI. We’ve got so used to seeing over 300 PPI when talking about phones but you should remember that your 23 inch 1080p monitor has a PPI of 95. The images on the beautiful screen are rendered by an Nvidia Tegra 3. Unfortunately thats not the latest Tegra 4 but from what I have seen, performance is not an issue.
The cockpit has different “views”. The first view is known as the “classic” view, this just like your normal car dash, the only difference is that the information is not displayed using gauges and dials, its just on a computer display. The display also shows you all the telemetry data you can ask for. Now lets talk about the cooler things. Audi have moved the multimedia controls to the “cockpit”, so you wow’t have to take your eyes off the road. Another cool thing for the multimedia system is that the car comes equipped with 10GB’s of flash storage to store your music. 10GB for this price point is very underwhelming and I am very disappointed. It’s also only a matter of time that someone runs Minecraft on it.
The main part of the dash is the navigation. Audi are using Google Earth and Google Street View for the navigation system. The car is equipped with a trackpad which enables you to navigate the Google Earth map and select your street view location. You may think that this is a novelty but it is very useful because you can get to know the place your going before even setting off. You can use Google like when searching for places. One example that the Audi rep showed was he searched for Starbucks, not the road just the place and the car was able to find where the nearest Starbucks was. This single feature will help drivers a lot.
do you want a virtual cockpit in your car?