Nissan has a brand new concept vehicle it unveiled at CES this year, called the ‘Xmotion.’ The crossover SUV concept vehicle features sleek exterior lines with sharp angles to accentuate details like the headlights, and inside blends touchscreen displays, innovative control mechanisms and spare accents to provide a look that’s both futuristic, and strangely rural and relaxing.
The Xmotion’s exterior was inspired by combining traditional Japanese nature views like Mt. Fuji with the electric and modern surrounds of the city, per Nissan, and it feels like something that would be at home in Blade Runner as well as in modern Tokyo.
While the exterior is interesting, most of what’s novel about this vehicle is happening on the inside. That includes a virtual assistant that’s embodied as a virtual koi on the in-car displays. The koi swims between the console and a middle-mounted armrest touchscreen, and can do things like intelligently program the interior cabin conditions, music and more based on the destination and user preferences. The virtual assistant will also contribute heavily while the car is engaged in autonomous mode, providing ample information about the current route and potential stopovers while switching lanes and handling driving duties.
Screens are prominent parts of the interior overall, and cameras mounted around the vehicle feed imagery to these displays in place of traditional mirrors.
Nissan is focusing on opening up the interior as much as possible here, too. The bucket seats have plenty of available rotation for use while in self-driving, and there’s a continuous, single console that extends from front to back to provide interior continuity between front and back passengers, and to evoke a kind of internal “river” within the cabin.
Atop this console, there’s also the new “floating commander,” which monitors for movement and can even sense gestures in order to translate those into controls for things like the cabin lighting and air conditioning.
Futuristic concepts are, in the end, just that – concepts. But this looks like a natural progression of a lot of the trends we’ve been seeing in the auto industry in general, so I wouldn’t bet against seeing this kind of stuff in production cars in the near future. Plus, I really just want a virtual fish to guide my driving experience.
The prospects for troubled banking-as-a-service startup Synapse have gone from bad to worse this week after a United States Trustee filed an emergency motion on Wednesday. The trustee is asking…
U.K.-based Seraphim Space is spinning up its 13th accelerator program, with nine participating companies working on a range of tech from propulsion to in-space manufacturing and space situational awareness. The…
OpenAI has reached a deal with Reddit to use the social news site’s data for training AI models. In a blog post on OpenAI’s press relations site, the company said…
For Mark Zuckerberg’s 40th birthday, his wife got him a photoshoot. Zuckerberg gives the camera a sly smile as he sits amid a carefully crafted re-creation of his childhood bedroom.…
We all fall down sometimes. Astronauts are no exception. You need to be in peak physical condition for space travel, but bulky space suits and lower gravity levels can be…
Microsoft will launch its custom Cobalt 100 chips to customers as a public preview at its Build conference next week, TechCrunch has learned. In an analyst briefing ahead of Build,…
Sony Music Group has sent letters to more than 700 tech companies and music streaming services to warn them not to use its music to train AI without explicit permission.…
Meta, the parent company of Facebook, launched an enterprise version of the prominent social network in 2015. It always seemed like a stretch for a company built on a consumer…
X, formerly Twitter, turned TweetDeck into X Pro and pushed it behind a paywall. But there is a new column-based social media tool in town, and it’s from Instagram Threads.…
As part of 2024’s Accessibility Awareness Day, Google is showing off some updates to Android that should be useful to folks with mobility or vision impairments. Project Gameface allows gamers…
A top European privacy watchdog is investigating following the recent breaches of Dell customers’ personal information, TechCrunch has learned. Ireland’s Data Protection Commission (DPC) deputy commissioner Graham Doyle confirmed to…
Ampere and Qualcomm aren’t the most obvious of partners. Both, after all, offer Arm-based chips for running data center servers (though Qualcomm’s largest market remains mobile). But as the two…
At Google’s I/O developer conference, the company made its case to developers — and to some extent, consumers — why its bets on AI are ahead of rivals. At the…
TechCrunch Disrupt has always been the ultimate convergence point for all things startup and tech. In the bustling world of innovation, it serves as the “big top” tent, where entrepreneurs,…
There’s apparently a lot of demand for an on-demand handyperson. Khosla Ventures and Pear VC have just tripled down on their investment in Honey Homes, which offers up a dedicated…
TikTok is testing the ability for users to upload 60-minute videos, the company confirmed to TechCrunch on Thursday. The feature is available to a limited group of users in select…
Flock Safety is a multibillion-dollar startup that’s got eyes everywhere. As of Wednesday, with the company’s new Solar Condor cameras, those eyes are solar-powered and use wireless 5G networks to…
Since he was very young, Bar Mor knew that he would inevitably do something with real estate. His family was involved in all types of real estate projects, from ground-up…
Poshmark, the social commerce site that lets people buy and sell new and used items to each other, launched a paid marketing tool on Thursday, giving sellers the ability to…
More money for the generative AI boom: Y Combinator-backed developer infrastructure startup Recall.ai announced Thursday it has raised a $10 million Series A funding round, bringing its total raised to over…
Engineers Adam Keating and Jeremy Andrews were tired of using spreadsheets and screenshots to collab with teammates — so they launched a startup, CoLab, to build a better way. The…
Reddit announced on Wednesday that it is reintroducing its awards system after shutting down the program last year. The company said that most of the mechanisms related to awards will…
Comment