Issue link: https://read.dmtmag.com/i/326874
July 2014 | Boating Industry | 33 www.BoatingIndustry.com /// Market Trends /// BY TOM KAISER Y ou've undoubtedly seen commercials for home automation systems promis- ing an effortless modern lifestyle. Did those wily kids leave the lights on? Pull out your cell phone from afar and it's lights out back home. Did you forget about the rack of lamb torching away in the oven? Avoiding an inferno is just a screen tap away. In the auto world, the latest infotainment systems pair smartphones and tablets with the car's Wi-Fi-connected system to monitor the health of the vehicle, automatically send main- tenance notifications, stream live radio stations, book hotel rooms and locate nearby restaurants among many other futuristic functions. The boating market is next up on the revolu- tion fast track. While we're still only seeing the tip of the iceberg, the latest cockpit technology combines the Internet with onboard sensors to provide real-time, location-specific data to cap- tains via gleaming, glassy displays that are be- coming the center of today's connected vessels. Moving beyond navigation Screens have been fixtures in high-end boats for years, primarily to display navigation and fish-finder information. Now engine controls, intelligent diagnostics and web-based data are being added to the mix in the latest generation of touch-based systems with wide-ranging im- plications for boat owners, manufacturers, the aftermarket and dealers. With ever more aspects of the vessel being integrated into one or more screens that can be manipulated by touch — just like smart- phones and tablets — today's connected cockpit screens can give you the weather forecast, chart a course, monitor fuel consumption, control pumps, provide real-time maintenance data that can be shared with nearby dealerships and even set the mood with one-touch navigational and lighting as the sun sets. "What we're trying to do is bring all impor- tant boat operating information to the operator at the helm station, and then allow it to be cus- tomizable to what's important for that particular user so they can change what they see in order to customize that experience," said Marcia Kull, Volvo Penta's vice president for marine sales. "It's actually better than car-like, because when you think about it in your car, you're going differ- ent places for different controls. To open your windows you use one thing, to open up your gas tank you use something else, if you want to con- trol your air conditioning you do something else. With the Glass Cockpit System, it's really all on that big multi-function display." Louis Chemi is executive vice president and managing director for the recreational marine di- vision of Navico, parent company of Lowrance, B&G, MX Marine and Simrad. He has helped coordinate a corporate restructuring around the idea of a digitally enabled boating experience where he said, "the possibilities are limitless." "There are different kinds of things you can do to add value to the consumer's boating expe- rience by taking data on and off the vessel," he said. "When you have [data] off the vessel you can put it into a database, you can crunch it with other data and factors you see going on, and you can bring the boater back a new set of informa- tion he wasn't aware of before." Navico's latest products include B&G's H5000 and Zeus Touch instrumentation, au- topilot and displays for the sailing market, and Simrad's NSO evo2 Glass Bridge system, which won an Innovation Award in the consumer electronics category at the 2014 Miami Inter- national Boat Show. Mastervolt, which recently teamed up with Garmin and Scout Boats for its fully integrated GPSMAP Glass Helm Series displays, said that recent technology is enabling a vastly different, more cohesive boating experience. "We're integrating products that people are used to using in their daily lives, but maybe not so much so in a boat, so things like a key fob that each of us uses every single day to open or close our car," said Michele Goldsmith, sales manager of key accounts and PR/media man- ager at Mastervolt. "Why not have a device like that where you press one button and it wakes up the boat, or another button that shuts the boat down for the evening?" World-class innovation The advancements developed by marine tech leaders haven't gone unnoticed in the wider boating industry. Volvo's Glass Cockpit System has received four industry innovation awards, including Miami. It's the result of a partnership with navigation experts, Garmin, where Volvo Penta developed the software and Garmin de- signed the touchscreen displays. The system is available in several different versions, with screens ranging in size from 8 to 19 inches — all glossy, glassy screens that are fully customizable to the operator's preferences. Power up the boat and all screens illuminate in sync, and those two screens with all their pinch- ing, zooming and swiping, is designed to control nearly every function on the boat. Volvo Penta's Kull said the Glass Cockpit's Auto Guidance is the feature that gets consum- ers most excited during in-person or simulated demos. Beyond just showing operators a route like traditional navigation, Auto Guidance searches all nearby nautical charts and creates a route guiding the vessel around shallow water, buoys and other potentially hidden obstacles. While more of a behind-the-scenes player until recently, Navico's brands have powered navigation displays on Polaris off-road vehicles and Baja-style off-road buggies, as well as its popular Lowrance fish finders. The company has partnered with marine manufacturers to pro- vide displays, including Mercury's multifunction VesselView that it has supplied for years. "We have probably sold more engine dis- plays than any other of the folks in the marine electronics space," Chemi said. "Some of those are under [non-disclosure agreements], but with a lot of the outboards you're looking at our dis- play on the dash." He added that while integration has been the category buzzword for years, the last few have seen the technology come to a level where ad- vanced displays are becoming standard equip- ment on many mainstream models. "With the deeper level of integration you can essentially clean up your dash," Chemi said. "You can take away some of the basic engine gauges that really don't provide much informa- tion. You can have a nice, clean dash that has your charting, fish finding, radar and engine data "We're integrating products that people are used to using in their daily lives, but maybe not so much so in a boat, so things like a key fob that each of us uses every single day to open or close our car." — Michele Goldsmith, sales manager of key accounts and PR/media manager at Mastervolt P32x36-BI14JUL-MarketTrends.indd 33 5/28/14 12:07 PM