The roots of Basemark are deep in the graphics industry in Finland. Its founder is Tero Sarkkinen, who earlier founded Rightware that became automotive market’s #1 provider of human machine interface (HMI) design and deployment tools. Tero bought out a small team from Rightware in 2015 and named it Basemark.
On this week’s Mobility Moments, Sarkkinen discuss Basemark’s AR development work for BMW Group, and its Rocksolid Core platform.
“We come from a long background of developing GPU and VR/AR performance testing software for NVIDIA, Qualcomm and the other chip giants. This gives us our unique competitive edge as we intimately know the strengths and weaknesses of various processor architectures,” he tells Auto Futures.
Describe Rocksolid Core and its key benefits
Rocksolid Core is a licensable automotive OS, middleware and E/E architecture for next generation software defined vehicles. Uniquely, it supports ALL car functions, ranging from steering, braking, acceleration to body electronics, digital instrument cluster, HUD, IVI, rear seat entertainment systems and so on.
For OEMs, the biggest benefits are:
- Breaking the chip vendor lock by ability to “code once, deploy to many different chips from different vendors”
- Unit cost savings in mass production (“BoM” savings). Estimations show around 185 € / car savings
- Time savings: Enhances the productivity of development teams
Explain your partnership with BMW
We have implemented augmented reality (AR) applications for the BMW Group. AR over-video application is the first one of these and is now available in BMW iX. The work has resulted in cutting-edge AR applications that use vehicle sensor data and computer vision functionality.
These enable AR-enhanced information to be shown on the car’s Central Information Display.
How can AR help improve the parking experience?
For instance, AR can display available parking places and cost of parking. Also, one can do object recognition and clearly alert the driver with AR graphics of nearing objects, pedestrians, etc.
How can Basemark help autonomous vehicle developers?
We are the ”shovels and picks” company for autonomous vehicle developers. Our business idea is to provide all the lower layer software stack that every car needs and then provide tools and higher level APIs for rapid development of the actual car applications, such as autonomous drive capabilities.
In addition, we offer reference applications which gives a great and advanced starting point for the development of e.g. driver monitoring system, lane keeping assistant, adaptive cruise control and safe HMIs.
How can Basemark help OEMs overcome the chip shortage?
We offer them ability to re-adapt their applications to work on many different chips as opposed to working only on one particular chip. Rocksolid Core is SoC vendor independent platform. It means that OEMs can change the main processing units of the vehicle with relatively small effort.
This also means that OEMs can plan and build their portfolios with more than one chip vendor based solutions.
What’s next for Basemark?
We have a strong focus in making Rocksolid Core as a success. We will start OEM pilots this year and will be ready for production development in 2023.
What will the in-vehicle experience look like by 2030?
In-Vehicle experience will be a strong multimedia experience. There will be lot of displays showing information about surroundings and what car perceives. And, perhaps already at that time, the car and the driver will communicate by brainwaves!
