The FINANCIAL — Hyundai Motor Group (the Group) organized the 2020 Open Innovation Lounge exhibition at its headquarters in Seoul on Nov. 16-17, featuring inventive new technologies and solutions spawned through joint collaboration between the Group’s staff members and engineers and those of startups from around the world.
The two-day event showcased unique innovations to be potentially incorporated into future vehicles following evaluation of their commercial feasibility by the Group. Vehicles embedded with diverse future-oriented solutions as well as prototypes of solutions were on display, offering an interactive opportunity for experiencing and imagining new possibilities of future automobiles.
The Open Innovation Lounge, as an open innovation platform, will nurture a culture of developing creative and agile new products and technologies within Hyundai Motor Group. It also attempts to incubate and hatch cutting-edge innovations through cooperation with external startups, and to commercialize them in response to a rapidly changing industry.
“In order to increase customer satisfaction, it is critical for any company to provide products the customers need in a timely manner,” said Thomas Schemera, Executive Vice President and Head of Product Division at Hyundai Motor Group. “We will strengthen the product competitiveness of Hyundai Motor Group by actively cooperating with global startups through the Open Innovation Lounge platform.”
Highlighting the Group’s innovation objective prioritizing customers, the platform was launched last year through evaluation of some 300 startups discovered by Hyundai Motor Group’s open innovation platform ZER01NE Accelerator in Seoul, and open innovation hubs, Hyundai CRADLE (Center for Robotic-Augmented Design in Living Experiences) in Silicon Valley, Berlin, Beijing and Tel Aviv.
Via ZER01NE Accelerator and Hyundai CRADLE, the Group has strengthened collaboration with startups to spur research and development of groundbreaking new technologies and solutions, and to support their future development and marketization.
Out of the 300 startups, 11 from around the world were chosen through evaluation of their solutions based on the criteria of customer needs and wants, technological feasibility and technological uniqueness. The participating 11 enterprises are: Genswell, Anyractive, PSYCURE, Microsystems, LOOMIA, Eyeris, NextInput, Comfort Motion Global (CMG), FLEXOUND, Maigao and Gauzy.
Hyundai Motor Group provided support to them, particularly helping them envision and flesh out various concepts from an automotive industry perspective as well as providing financial and logistical support to execute their projects.
At the exhibition, the 11 startups showcased solutions in the three categories of vehicle entertainment, vehicle convenience and vehicle safety and hygiene. In the vehicle entertainment arena were Genswell’s ‘Haptic Bass Booster,’ which creates dynamic vibrations connected to the vehicle sound system; Anyractive’s ‘Glass Touch Control,’ which enables using the side glasses of a vehicle as touch displays; NextInput’s ‘Force Touch HMI,’ which offers a new human-machine interface experience by changing the hard keys in the vehicle to force-touch keys on different materials such as wood, steel, aluminum and glass; and FLEXOUND’s ‘Immersive Personal Sound Experience,’ which provides an immersive, three-dimensional sound experience in each cabin seat by combining sound and elastic vibration.
In the vehicle convenience arena were Microsystems’ ‘Automatic Sensor Cleaning,’ which removes liquid matters on the vehicle glass through vibration; LOOMIA’s ‘E-textile,’ which replaces the door panels to ‘E-textiles’ offering heating, lighting, touch points and others as a novel form of human-machine interface; CMG’s ‘Fatigue Relievance Seat,’ which finetunes the weight distribution of a seat by detecting a passenger’s movement, thereby reducing passenger fatigue; Maigao’s ‘Rear Glass Advertisement,’ which projects commercial images on the rear window through a micro-projector; and Gauzy’s ‘Smart Glass,’ which controls the transparency of vehicle glass components, enabling them to offer different shades subject to the occupant’s needs.
In the vehicle safety and hygiene arena were PSYCURE’s ‘Sterilizing Light,’ which installs a sterilizing LED on the ambient lighting system to provide continuous disinfection of cabin space; and Eyeris’s ‘In-Cabin Monitoring,’ which recognizes the movement of passengers and objects in the cabin for diverse safety and convenience-related applications.
