The route to the future?

I spent a couple of days with infotainment expert Harman recently. You might know the company better by some of its brand names, such as Harman/Kardon (in Mercedes cars), or Mark Levinson (Lexus). It’s also behind speaker maker JBL. I was with the company to hear about some future technologies that it’s working on, much of which are to do with reinventing the electrical architecture of the car so manufacturers can offer more and better features. But Harman is also developing the software to be used on these next-generation cars, and a great example is what it’s doing with sat-nav. Take a look at the picture above. If you’ve seen the Leonardo DiCaprio sci-fi thriller of last year, Inception, you’ll be quite familiar with this! If you haven’t, you won’t know what I’m talking about! The point is this system is called MultiPerspective, and it folds the map at the horizon through 90 degrees. It allows you to see much more of the route ahead, so you can pre-empt junctions. Pretty clever, huh?