Mazda 3′s new infotainment system
The Mazda 3 features a new infotainment system with its aim being to future-proof the vehicle to keep up with the constantly changing world of multimedia and smartphones.
Mazda has spent a lot of effort in designing the cabin of the Mazda 3 in order to reduce driver distraction behind the wheel and the infotainment system is a large chunk of that effort. Details like the angle of the information display to the text size have been analyzed over and over to make sure that the cabin is extremely safe.
Mazda has focused their attention on what they’ve termed three modes of driver distraction: there’s visual distraction – eyes off road, there’s cognitive distraction – wandering mind, and then there’s also manual distraction – hands off wheel. These were the main targets taken into consideration by the designers of the Mazda human machine interface – HMI.
Ryuichi Umeshita – Mazda’s general manager of production – said that they used American psychologist George Miller’s research related to how many pieces of information an average adult is capable to recognize at once – that number is seven, plus or minus two – to develop the display interface in the Mazda 3, which is located 750mm away from the driver’s eyes.
Taking that research into consideration and adding to it the ISO standards for text size and line spacing – which they improved on – the display chosen was a seven-inch high-resolution one. This screen, while touch-sensitive, is located to a rotary dial and voice interface while the vehicle is moving because the company’s research has shown that the car is far more likely to move around unintentionally when the driver is distracted with actual touch inputs.
The idea behind this new infotainment system is to also somewhat ‘future-proof’ the vehicle, in order to leave some space for the yet unknown future developments of smartphone and multimedia technologies in general. As such they did their best to make the system as updatable as possible for the current time.
