Last week’s Qt World Summit was very busy for us; our own presentation (‘Mixing Reality with Qt’) drew a large audience and the #MixedRealityCockpit was very popular on the conference floor. We did, however, find time to attend several other presentations and learn about the latest advances in Qt technology.
Check out some of these insights:
Andreas Aal, Computing Systems, Volkswagen
Topic: Integrating UX into HW/SW Co-design Analysis Infrastructures
This presentation discussed connecting hardware and software to simulate vehicles before they’re built: a concept based heavily on that of Digital Twin, with all aspects of the vehicle available for simulation in an environment built with Qt, Unreal Engine, ROS and VR.
Our opinion: We’re glad to see that testing and simulating these vehicles, such large and complex systems, is finally possible. This is certainly necessary, as future cars will require better tools to build wonderful user experiences; otherwise, the time to market will suffer.
Victora Fischer, Engineering Lead, Mercedes-Benz/MBition
Topic: Mercedes-Benz Customer Case
The current software architecture in Mercedes-Benz cars reflects the connection of multiple technologies; for example, many layers of graphics blend seamlessly to create HMI screen content. The traditional content composition approach using Wayland, however, has a flaw: the entire HMI goes down when the composer crashes. Victoria presented an alternate approach using a well-established KDE window manager (Kwin), which decouples the layers and solves the problem in a stable vehicle environment.
Our opinion: We’re happy to observe complex problems resolved in such an elegant manner. Given the wide breadth of new features, HMIs will ultimately become more complex and thus require new approaches such as this to make sure new experiences are feasible.
Tapio Haantie, Product Business Line Director, Qt Group
Topic: Qt Academy
Qt launched a website with free online courses wherein the best industry experts detail both basic and advanced Qt topics. Approximately 80,000 people have already enrolled, a great result reflecting the large amount of interest in the initiative. FYI (Focus Your Ideas), a company founded by will.i.am and LET’S GO x J BALVIN, is tasked with creating the first track of courses. “The potential of Qt Academy is huge,” , co-founder and CEO of FYI touted.
Our opinion: We’re thrilled to see Qt break through as a more approachable solution for new generations of designers and developers.
Final Takeaway: Day 1 ended with a great panel discussion about how AI can (or cannot) help with respect to software development. One key takeaway is that AI can currently speed up the tasks we know how to perform ourselves personally, as it’s simple for us to verify the output. A challenge, though, arises when we ask AI to perform a task we don’t know how to do; we have no means to verify output accuracy, and results that appear sound may in fact not be. Therefore, rather than increasing our productivity, we’d spend time troubleshooting the problem we’re unaware of.
Our opinion: We love this simple yet powerful statement communicating a piece of life advice. We’re here to embrace AI, but we still have so much to learn about how to use it effectively.
