Microsoft: How smart cities or smart cities can get started with cars? Forget what you knew about stand-alone cars for a moment. In the future, this will be just a small piece of the puzzle. Real money is on the data coming from cars. Imagine millions of connected vehicles feeding rich data to a central server. These data can be used to improve traffic flow to save you time by avoiding traffic, avoiding accidents, saving fuel, finding better navigation routes, and more.
In the next decade (or twenty years) there's a chance most of us will own one autonomous car or even an old one that has new technology added.
What will happen is that cars will need to connect to each other, to the road, to the infrastructure, and even beyond that, to the Internet of Things, the office and the home your. This is the future that Microsoft envisions, a future that will run in the cloud. Even older cars could be connected to the cloud, and not just those with self-driving features. And that could happen sooner than you think.
A major step forward Microsoft has announced Microsoft Connected, an in-vehicle platform that will provide tools and algorithms for automakers to develop new technologies, analyze data, and help drivers.
Doug Seven, program manager for Microsoft Azure, IoT and Microsoft Connected Vehicle Platform, told VB that the platform is like having a set of Lego blocks. The platform can help with electronic payments from the car, or traffic reports, or to avoid a collision.
He gave a really good example.
Let's say you are sitting at home and wondering when you should leave for work. The Cortana digital assistant from your laptop will tell you that it is best to leave for your meeting in the city. The digital assistant will know why he will know if there is a delay due to traffic. You can decide to delay a little bit, and when you get into your car, Cortana will let you know that it's too late, while offering you a teleconference from your car. Because wireless congestion is a problem in your city, Cortana chooses a route that optimizes call quality.
Finish fuel, and Cortana automatically selects a service station that is along the route and you've used it before. You will just drive and the bot will think.
This is different from autonomous driving. It is driven by the data.
Microsoft's Seven gave another example of how this technology could help with security. As you drive, your car can connect to the cloud and look for problems on the road. Since many cars are linked to the cloud, you will know that a ladder fell from a truck located a few miles ahead, from reports that have sent other cars. So you can take a different route, avoiding any driving problems.
One of the benefits is that a computer μπορεί να προχωρήσει και να “δει” πολύ πιο μακριά από ότι μπορεί να δει ο οδηγός από τα δεδομένα που τον τροφοδοτεί το σύννεφο. Υπάρχει πάγος σε ένα μέρος του δρόμου; κάποιο εγκαταλελειμμένο αυτοκίνητο; απροσδόκητες καιρικές συνθήκες;
This will lead to smarter cities where – as Seven reports – all data will be fed into a traffic management system, which will have the information of to the drivers. The rich data will help city planners balance load, develop new self-regulating highways, or adjust lights in real time. As Seven reports, this could be the first step towards a smart city that knows about every car on the road, available routes, all traffic incidents, and even optimal speeds.
After that, smart cities according to Microsoft's vision could make parking lots and more. Workers could arrive at about the same time at work, which will already be with the heating or air conditioning work.
