techdays6

Novi Tech Day: Our Latest Innovations Straight from the Source

Last January HARMAN launched our new North American automotive headquarters and hosted our first tech show in Novi.  Now, a year later, we’re making it an annual event to highlight some of the coolest technology driving the auto industry forward.

We have an incredible wealth of talent in our Novi office who are passionately invested in their work to make everyone’s daily routine more enjoyable, entertaining, personalized and productive. From home to car, from work to leisure, HARMAN is touching every aspect of life.

At this week’s tech show, we provided an in-depth look at our end-to-end solutions offering thrilling new experiences for audio, infotainment and services, as well as professional retail experiences. This week customers, families and friends walked through of our latest technologies and experienced our state-of-the-art facility including our audio listening room, a full cinema, an anechoic chamber for the accurate designing and testing of transducers (speakers), as well as some great employee amenities including a fitness center, cafeteria, collaboration spaces and an outdoor deck and patio space.

So what cutting-edge products were we proud to show this year? Here’s a sampling of what attendees got to experience:

An Intelligent Cockpit for Seamless Vehicle Personalization

The promise of the connected car is that all the added technology and features work seamlessly for consumers. To achieve this, at CES we unveiled the industry’s most advanced vehicle intelligent cockpit, powered by HARMAN’s compute platform, an end-to-end system designed to integrate the vehicle’s instrumentation cluster and connectivity and safety features. HARMAN’s integrated cockpit and bleeding edge user interface delivers a driving experience that is more powerful, productive, personalized and protected than ever before. The system also supports a suite of new features that put the car at the center of consumers’ connected lifestyles, such as an integrated digital personal assistant and car-to-home automation, as well as 360-degree camera views and augmented reality navigation.

Check out a demo of HARMAN’s intelligent cockpit here.

Advanced Sound Management Transports the Mind and Body

Those joining us in Novi also got to check out what can come out of HARMAN’s strong heritage and expertise in audio and acoustics innovation. The HARMAN SUMMIT Next smart audio platform creates new levels of audio customization and control for enhanced user experiences in the car cabin with features such as Ambisonics Escape, which recreates environments such as the beach, a forest, waterfalls and more through a full 360-degree sound field. The new Dynamic Sound Stage (DSS) connects music playing in the car to the environment you’re driving. Much like with adaptive headlights, it allows your music to follow the curves of your drive route. Summit Next demonstrates how we believe car audio now plays a critical role evolving the vehicle’s interior far beyond just great sound, in also creating enhanced safety, comfort and entertainment.

View the video demo of SUMMIT Next here.

The Car Becomes Central to Today’s Connected Lifestyle

Our Novi team also demoed HARMAN’s new automotive cloud platform, Ignite, which supports a one-stop ecosystem connecting all aspects of the car from applications, OTA updates, data analytics and automotive services. Ignite provides automakers with a secure, flexible platform to test and update technology features and services to better meet the needs of existing customers and remain agile to support new vehicle ownership models and use cases. 

You can check out the Ignite platform here.

The world is watching as our relationship to our cars and transportation is forever transformed thanks to today’s latest connected features and fully autonomous experiences. While these new comforts and services win our attention, their success hinges on the fundamentals: a fast, robust compute platform to act as the control center and ensure seamless operations; provisioning for over-the-air (OTA) updates to help in-car services keep pace with the latest developments; and the strongest security framework to ensure the system remains safe and secure. Our top-notch team in Novi (and around the world) are at the forefront of developing those solutions and our team had a fantastic time this week showing those to our families, friends and customers.