Car Navigation System Gets Digitized

Sony's new global positioning system for Japanese cars, called XYZ navigation, delivers 3-D graphics and location information using video game graphic technology, according to this Wired News article.

Seems even the new car systems are coming with multimedia capabilities. The GPS device has a hard drive, a graphics engine, and MP3 playback capabilities as well, which makes it a rolling set-top box that runs on the Linux operating system, according to this post at LinuxDevices.com.

Writing about in-car graphics devices does, admittedly, seem a little off topic for this blog. However, it's just another example of virtual worlds beginning to bleed over into reality. The biggest advances continue to come from NVidia, but more and more, we're seeing digital avatars and digital representations appearing in our everyday life.

The reason for this is very simple: people spend more time in front of computers these days, and they are used to seeing these digital representations.

I may be plagiarizing myself here (because this particular statistic bears repeating), but according to the latest usage figures from the Pew Internet & American Life Project, 77 percent of the people between the ages of 13 and 29 use the Internet on a regular basis, by far the largest majority of age-related users. What's more, people between the ages of 13 and 24 spend more time per week online (16.7 hours) than they do watching television (13.6 hours), listening to the radio (12.0 hours), or talking on the phones (7.7 hours).