Interface Development Environments: When Gaming and Auto Intertwine

HMI development frameworks have become a new battleground for companies vying for a piece of the automotive industry. From long standing industry heavyweights like Greenhills offering out-of-the-box HMI tools to new players like Incari bringing AI into the production flow, here we’ll take a look into the players and competitors looking to become the victors.

To begin, it’s worth mentioning that there isn’t a universal name for the tools used to create an HMI, and the market is crowded. Here’s a non exhaustive list of the options and how they describe themselves:

Altia: GUI development software
Kanzi: An all-in-one toolchain,
Qt Design Studio: UI design tool
Incari: A development platform
GL Studio: HMI development tool
Unity: HMI software solution
Unreal: Advanced automotive and car design software
Apple: Carplay for developers
Android (AAOS): Infotainment platform solution
Luxsoft: Digital instrument cluster solution
Elektrobit: HMI Platform

At Conjure, we describe them as Interface Development Environments (IDEs) and, as the industry itself can’t decide on a term, we’re sticking to ours.

In 2024, we have a crowded market with Altia, Kanzi (Rightware), Unreal, and Unity leading the pack. Though their metaphorical story trees seem to meet at the same point now, they have all come from vastly different places.

Altia began as a spinoff of UI prototyping software that the founders had initially built for their work at HP (Hewlett Packard), but then realised it would be useful to other organisations. Be it a gesture of goodwill, or a testament to the quality of their product, HP would go on to become their first customer once they left the company and began their own venture.

Altia stayed on what could be classed as “the straight and narrow” from there on, continuing to work with the likes of HP, Fluke, Ford, and GM, slowly establishing themselves as the industry standard in manufacturing, as well as in the automotive space, due to their strengths in real-time data visualisation and control.

Kanzi’s story is a bit more serpentine. Initially founded as MadOnion.com, the Futuremark Corporation began life as a 3D benchmarking platform. Fast forward to 2009, and Futuremark’s mobile & embedded software unit is spun off to become Rightware, which goes on to develop Kanzi.

Since Audi adopted their technology in their range of consumer vehicles in 2013, Kanzi has been known as a more lightweight and design-oriented software than others in the market, making it a very attractive prospect for OEMs, and is now used by over 50 OEMs and Tier 1 suppliers.

With these two fairly established companies leading the market — there are more around, but these have historically been the industry standards for OEMs — the gods of the free market decided it was time for some new competitors.

The turn of the millennium saw the rise of the powerful, licensable 3D gaming engines Unreal Engine (Unreal) and Unity. These engines, originally designed for video game development, possessed features highly relevant to HMI development such as real-time graphics, physics engines, and the ability to utilise them in cross-platform development environments.

Epic Games, creators of Unreal, have had their eyes on the auto space ever since they launched a custom car configurator seven years back. The appeal to the OEMs of Unreal running the HMI was obvious, as in the early days of HMI design and development every car maker wanted a 3D version of their vehicle in the dash, and nothing looks as good as Unreal does, either back then or now.

For all of Epic’s ambitions to dominate the HMI IDE space, however, the competition was fast to react. Knowing they couldn’t compete in terms of raw rendering quality, Rightware doubled down on their modules for Kanzi, including Connect, Maps, Particles, VR, and Stereoscopy. Making their IDE easier to implement and providing flexibility in terms of licensing this was a smart move by the Finish outfit. Their mapping module is particularly impressive, both in terms of feature set and visual fidelity, plus it handles ADAS out of the box which is a nice touch.

Meanwhile in Germany, Incari have doubled down on AI, introducing Inna, which is essentially a single click logic creation aid similar to GitHub Copilot. With an already intuitive interface (a cross between Maya and After Effects), Incari’s focus on development streamlining makes it an attractive option for HMI creation.

In contrast, Austria’s Candera-made CGI Studio lags behind. Fusion Editor was added last year to bring it inline with Incari’s node based editor and it touts easy Figma file import options but beyond this there is little to shout about. It’s hard to imagine anyone getting particularly excited about simple primitive inclusion.

It’s worth highlighting that all of the dedicated automotive HMI tools protect for safety critical development, an area that Unreal and Unity don’t support natively, giving the old guard an advantage over the newcomers. Though that advantage may well dissipate somewhat when we talk about pricing.

All of the IDE providers are typically opaque when it comes to licensing and pricing. Only Qt has prices on its website, with their Design Tools suite coming in at $2,360 per seat per year. We last used CGI Studio back in 2018 and that was $50,000 a seat. Kanzi was $11,000, though this may well have changed in recent years.

With Unreal and Unity able to subsidise their HMI push with revenue from the wider gaming world, it wouldn’t be surprising if they have aggressively reduced licence fees to gain market traction. Epic made over $6b, yes billion, from Fortnight alone in 2022, so it’s safe to say they have pretty deep pockets.

To that end, the investment in seats especially for agencies and smaller OEMs has to be carefully considered. Learning and mastering IDEs takes time, with typically 12–18 months required to get someone up to a commercial level. That said, once someone is up to speed on one, transitioning to another is normally fairly rapid, 3–6 months in our experience.

With all of this in mind, it’s hard not to see a way into the market for the likes of Unreal and Unity — how large that market slice ends up being, however, remains to be seen, as the HMI development landscape is constantly evolving.

Today, we see a mix of established players like Altia and Kanzi coexisting with the powerhouses of Unreal and Unity and, additionally, open-source frameworks like Qt are gaining traction. The future likely holds a collaborative environment where companies leverage the strengths of different frameworks. For instance, developers might use Altia for its SCADA functionalities, while integrating Unreal Engine for high-fidelity 3D visualisations within the same HMI.

At the end of the day, however, it will always come down to, as it inevitably does, the cost and the value that these IDEs can provide OEMs. Whoever wins that battle will likely win favour in the highly concentrated automotive industry.