Uncomfortable bedfellows : Luxury and HMI Design

It’s summer 2010 and damn you’re feeling good. You aced the pitch, impressed the bosses, and the afternoon’s all yours. Your Aston Martin purrs to a halt outside Soho Farmhouse, and as you swing out of the seat and stride under the arch you catch your reflection in the glass of the reception doors; your Versace dress is killing it with those Louboutins. You give yourself a smile with finger guns, girl you’ve earned it.

Your friend is already there, two glasses of Armand de Brignac bubbling with lavish intent. As you settle down you reach into your LV clutch and present your new phone, a Vertu Constellation Quest. “Amazing” your friend coos. Inside you’re beaming. But lo! What is that you spy? The hipster on the table opposite has the just-released iPhone 4. Suddenly your sapphire encrusted symbion doesn’t feel quite so special.

Fuck’s sake, you think. Your day is ruined.

Technology and luxury have long made uncomfortable bedfellows. Sam Livingstone of Car Design Research fame penned an excellent piece titled Where is Luxury HMI Design?, and this article is my take on that question.

Luxury as a Concept

Sam’s piece opens with a comment on the definition of luxury:

“Luxury is a nebulous concept that varies according to the type of experience or product it describes. The luxuries of smoking a cigar, staying in a five star hotel room, eating a spoonful of caviar, or taking a drive in a Bugatti Chiron share little — the qualities of these luxury products are distinct to their genre. But there does tend to be some shared experiential elements and product qualities that go into luxury experiences and luxury items: the way that they are strong, distinct, special; that they tend to be sensory, particularly their materiality; how they exhibit refinement from effort and expertise that went into designing and making them; that they are rarified; that they are expensive.”

And he’s right. We know what luxury looks, feels and tastes like even when it takes on very different forms and in the world of product, function rarely factors into the luxuriousness. A £28 laptop bag from Amazon performs the same function as its £1,490 Louis Vuitton equivalent.

Following its invention in the 15th century the pocket watch quickly became a status symbol. The hand made precision required to manufacture a watch combined with frequent use of gold and silver in their housing meant only the wealthiest could afford them.

Contrast that with the advent of the portable cassette player in 1979, which was futuristic, practical and costing circa $500 in today’s money, and yet was never considered a luxury item.

It was arguably the Blackberry, with its leather back and association with business success that was the first piece of modern technology that approached a luxury item, however when marketing focuses on specification it’s value hinges on measurable stats, not subjective taste. Great if you’re a geek, less interesting if you’re a fashionista.

The single and yet most notable exception is of course Apple, who until as recently as April this year had Burberry’s ex CEO Angela Ahrendts heading up their retail division. Her original appointment in 2013 was a clear sign that Apple was determined to cement itself as a luxury brand, and with their priciest watch clocking in at a cool $17,000 you can’t fault them for trying. That said, their watches at all price points are unequivocal best sellers. Apple owns the brand, and they own the technology.

Contrast that with Vertu who tried valiantly to be the luxury phone maker, but simply sticking diamonds on a second tier phone was never going to be enough, as the rapid obsolescence of the tech inside would always eventually render the device an inferior product, risking sneers from owners of cheaper yet better handsets.

Quality and Rarity

Technology makers benefit from scale. Shipping hundreds of thousands of units nets manufacturers profit, profit which can be invested in R&D, which in turn leads to better products. But by definition the more you sell the less rare your product becomes, and rarity is a prerequisite of something luxurious.

This becomes massively problematic for elite car manufacturers. Take Lamborghini. Buy a £155,000 Huracan and you would expect the interior technology to be cutting edge, yet owners would be disappointed to see the IVI is identical to that of your average Audi. They can’t break free from their inherited systems as they simply haven’t the capital scale to create and control their own. With a net income of circa 10 million euros they are dwarfed by their owner Audi with a net income of 3.5 billion. As things stand today they have little choice but to accept the hand-me-downs from their bigger brother.

This pattern is repeated across the luxury car market. Skip to 2:34 on this video review by Car Wow of the £120,000 Aston Martin Vantage 2018 and you can see the reviewer has dumped his phone on top of the IVI to use it’s sat nav. What does this tell the 1.5million viewers about Aston’s borrowed Mercedes tech? This is the car of James Bond for Christ’s sake.

Hope Springs Eternal

Things may well change. The slow but relentless march of hardware improvement and lowering costs will eventually see decent graphics chips emerge in dashboards and IVI systems. Voice control and VPAs will mature. Connectivity between home, work and car will become standard.

Interface development environments (IDEs) such as Altia and Kanzi are embracing advanced 2D and 3D graphical features. Bloom, particle systems and procedural shaders are giving design houses like ours an ever-increasing palette of creative options.

As way of an example it’s worth commenting on the Rolls Royce Eleanor concept video. The demonstrated avatar takes centre stage, teasing a luxury virtual assistant beautifully rendered and ready to serve. This could be created in real time 3D using a combination of particle systems, solid body deformation and an inverse kinematic rig, all techniques frequently deployed in gaming and no doubt soon to appear in next gen IDEs.

In terms of hardware, a mid range Nvidia GTX GPU would barely break sweat rendering Eleanor, but until GPU prices drop to IMX 6 levels we’ll just have to wait.

Running to stay still

But perhaps it won’t be enough. We may see a Red Queen scenario emerge, where the pace of progress by brands like Apple continually set a standard that no OEM can ever reach. As the bar is continually raised the consumers expectations of a luxury HMI experience will rise with it.

Sam Livingstone closed his piece making the poignant point that luxury is hard-won. It took Apple twenty years to elevate themselves to the fringes of true luxury. One of their greatest successes was bringing technology to the masses; a billionaire can own a yacht, but you can still own the best phone, and yet this very fact perhaps will forever deny them true luxury status.

Can an OEM create an HMI experience that is truly luxury? I believe they can, but we’ve a long way to run before we get there.