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A ‘Social’ & ‘Connected’ yacht
Technology is progressing on all fronts with Apple recently show casing the ‘New iPad’ and various automobile manufacturers launching their newest designs and concepts. Despite such progresses its impressive how companies such as Airbus despite the never ending test flights and model driven development have still been able to produce A380s which are experiencing some Wing cracks in most of the £250million A380 superjumbos.
On the other hand when looking at the marine industry, namely the industry we are striving to bring up to date with regards to technology the urge and willingness by manufactures to innovate is still lacking. The MARSSA project on the other hand is constantly pushing forward and the results we are achieving are impressive. Despite opposition from the marine community, the challenges faced by all players in the industry are surfacing, as can be seen in this article which brings to light the problems in the NMEA protocol. A lot of work has been done by the community on the definition of the lower levels of MARSSA with the first instance of the Reference Architecture finally taking shape. We are now determining which the best licensing agreement to abide by is, and the best strategy to adopt when it comes to the whole eco system, right from deploying MARSSA on a computer to downloading the Apps required from the App store.
It has become obvious that the platform for the time being will focus on the infotainment side of things, leaving the hard real-time systems to dedicated computers. MARSSA is therefore enabling a platform which will make it much easier for other platforms to enter this domain and provide the much needed HCI. A case in point, the TIZEN project would fit in perfectly in this niche and eco system allowing MARSSA to focus on the core back end services needed, allowing a marine flavor of TIZEN to be the first dedicated (MIVI) Marine In-Vessel Infotainment system.
Focus is therefore being placed on the infotainment side of things and Fords SYNC technology is surely innovating heavily in this domain. Ford has partnered up with big players in the technological world with companies such as Microsoft and very recently also organizing a hackathon with Facebook engineers. This definitely is the way to go and FORD un like all other players in the industry has come to terms with the fact that car owners want to remain connected all the time and are in search of the ultimate connected and social car. Over the next couple of years it is forecasted that the decided factor when purchasing a new car will be the technology used in the IVI and how ‘Social’ the car really is.
Our aim with MARSSA is therefore to enable yachts to take on the same approach and become more connected and social. This is only possible with a platform such as MARSSA which abstracts the developers from all the low level interactions allowing them to focus on the development of high level apps which enable yachts to become more social.
The ideal world in line with the EUs vision for 2020 would be a totally interconnected transportation system in which one would seamlessly transition from his car to yacht to private jet with all systems interacting in a seamless manner.
This is what we are out to achieve with MARSSA, connecting all transport systems with one another. A typical example would be the automated synchronization of ones car IVI with his yachts MIVI. This would allow the children to hear the same music in the car as that on board the yacht, as well as videos and Apps. Our vision with MARSSA would be a yacht which tweets and posts updates on Facebook and other social media platforms, allowing the yachts owner to remain in contact with the world throughout every step of his journey, helping to increase his safety and enjoyment. With this vision in mind we are making significant steps in the right direction, and once the platform is complete and the API released Social yachts will become the norm.
We are achieving this with a series of webinars, with the next one scheduled on the 21st of March which are helping us to focus our efforts in line with the vision of the EU in preparation for a Horizon 2020 funded project.
MARSSA - Enabling the future of the marine industry.
