Discussion: Sony × TS TECH

It was a lot of fun. It’s so innovative to be able to use the seat as a controller. If you shift your center of gravity to the right, your virtual player turns to the right, and if you move to the middle, it goes straight ahead. You can move forward or backward, right or left while remaining seated the whole time. I thought that if we could create a new UI^*3 that enables you to move around depending on the way you sit, it would really change the way we think about a vehicle’s cabin space. It would be interesting to try out these seats in the SC-1.^*4

Also, although the INNOVAGE^*2 cabin interior has a steering wheel, I think it would be even more interesting if you could take out the steering wheel and allow people to control the INNOVAGE interior from the comfort of an Aisareru Seat.

• See column on TS TECH’s INNOVAGE and Aisareru Seat
• UI (User Interface): The connection point between users and products or services
• See column on Sony’s SC-1

A fusion of INNOVAGE and the Aisareru Seat certainly sounds interesting. Incidentally, the seats installed in INNOVAGE are also filled with TS TECH technology.

The INNOVAGE seats are based on the Aibou Seat, which acts as a kind of partner for the driver. The Aibou Seat senses the physique and posture of the person sitting in it and automatically adjusts accordingly to a comfortable driving position. It has one function to adjust to an ideal posture for a driver, and another that determines whether the person sitting in the seat is drowsy and vibrates as needed to keep that person alert. A variety of other features were carefully selected for inclusion in INNOVAGE.

Although we ended up not installing it in the INNOVAGE interior, we also have a seat known as the ExerRide Seat, which is an evolved form of the Aibou Seat. When in a relatively stable driving environment, the part of the seat cushion that is in contact with the pelvis moves, allowing the rider to replace driving time with exercise time. In today’s lifestyle, many of us don’t get the ideal amount of exercise, but these seats can help people to burn calories during driving time.

Fixing a lack of exercise by driving? If these seats could actually be installed in vehicles, more people would probably get into their cars to do some exercise!

One of the keywords in the concept plan for INNOVAGE was “health.” It would be great if you could not only manage your health with sensors to monitor breathing and heart rate but also address a lack of exercise and get healthy just by sitting down. In addition to meeting needs related to the advent of CASE (Connected, Autonomous, Shared, Electric) vehicles, we also want to give value to “sitting” and transform travel from simply being a period that you spend getting to your destination into a time that takes on a new meaning through the use of seat technology.

Protecting lives is the top priority for automobiles, and TS TECH has continued to provide products that comply with the laws and regulations of each country, as well as the durability and comfort standards unique to each auto manufacturer. Today’s vehicles ensure safety through the designs of their chassis and seats. If fully automated driving becomes a reality in the future, and if cars are no longer in any danger of crashing, conventional notions may be dramatically altered. It could mean that not only dedicated seat manufacturers but also home interior manufacturers could become able to make seats that are both comfortable and also look good.

In terms of automated driving, the SC-1 has sensors in all directions so it won’t veer off course while driving, but it does occasionally make an emergency stop even at speeds of 3 km/h. Even in a fully automated vehicle, I feel that it will still be necessary to balance both safety—with seats that keep riders safe in the event of emergency stops—and entertainment. I think this will really prove to be valuable.

Yes, it is likely to be a long time before collision-free driving becomes a reality in society as a whole, so I think our biggest challenge will be how to maximize a car’s safety while also providing an interior space with a reasonable amount of freedom.

For example, long journeys by plane can be very draining. However, if you have a comfortable seat and fun entertainment, you can turn that plane ride or any other situation, even an irritating traffic jam, into a fun time and a fun place to be.

The INNOVAGE concept includes the key phrase “making time,” and we are thinking about how to transform the interior space of a car from one that has, until now, just been for the purpose of movement, and give that time spent on the move new meaning and value.

That’s a similar idea to the SC-1, a vehicle that actually dares to travel at a slower speed than normal. This is based on the idea that even if the speed is as slow as walking, if the content during the ride is fun and you are comfortable, you’ll feel like you’ve reached a distant place in no time at all. Our aim with the SC-1 is to provide movement that makes people forget about time.

Until now, cars have never really been personalized because they are industrial products that are mass produced in the same way from a productivity standpoint. One of my dreams is to provide the best possible solutions to specific requests for seat functions so that new value in the cabin interior also becomes a factor for consideration when people purchase a vehicle.

Collaborations with university researchers and experts from different industries have resulted in novel ideas that we would never have come up with on our own. Since we’ve built up a track record and gained a reputation for unmanned automated driving, we now want to create even more appealing content. What I would like to do someday is create a concept that is completely different from current norms, where the ride to your destination is free—in other words, the physical movement is free—and revenue is instead generated from the content that is used in the cabin space.

I sense some real possibilities here because if the SC-1 itself could be driven using the Aisareru Seat, this would mean that we could build cars that can be operated by anyone, regardless of their physical health. It would be good to think a little more about how we can use the SC-1 and the Aisareru Seat to assist society.

I agree completely. I felt that the goal of bringing smiles to people’s faces during their travel time was common ground for us. What I want to do now is move beyond the confines of automobiles and consider how we can develop problem-solving applications for facets of communities like schools, hospitals, and nursing facilities to provide new value, joy, and fun to society.