You take your smartphone or tablet and point it towards the part of the car you want to understand. Take the engine bay, what is there to know? Well, with Hyundai’s new app, you don’t need to read the owner’s manual anymore to find out.
Hyundai has announced it will soon become the first mainstream automaker to launch an augmented reality owner’s manual app. It’s an upgrade of the traditional book any new car comes with, if you wish, one that could prove to be a lot more useful. The Hyundai Virtual Guide app allows customers to use their smartphone or tablet to get how-to information for repairs, maintenance, and vehicle features.
When the app becomes available later this year, it will only be compatible with the 2015 Sonata, but additional models will follow. According to the South Korean auto manufacturer, the new app recognizes more than 45 major features of the Sonata and is available for free download from both the Apple App Store and Google Play.
For those who wonder what lies behind this sorcery, you’ll want to know Hyundai used quality consumer survey results to determine the top difficult-to-use features to incorporate into the Virtual Guide. The app also contains 82 how-to videos, six 3D overlay images that appear once users scan areas of their cars such as the engine bay, and more than 50 instructional guides.
“The Virtual Guide is aimed at educating our owners on how to use the functions and features of their vehicle,” said Frank Ferrara, executive vice president, customer satisfaction, Hyundai Motor America. “We modernized the idea of an owner’s manual to provide the highest-quality user experience for the growing population of tech-savvy consumers.”
South Koreans are well-known for their gizmos, and this puppy makes no difference. The Hyundai Virtual Guide uses two- and three-dimension tracking technology to deliver deep levels of information related to different parts of the car. Here’s the list of features covered by the how-to information app:
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