The future of digital cockpits: An interview with QNX
As the automotive industry embraces digital transformations, car interiors are evolving rapidly. The major driver of this change: Digital cockpits. These high-tech dashboards are becoming critical components for enhancing the driving experience and meeting customer expectations for seamless, connected vehicles.
At QNX, a division of BlackBerry Limited, the company recently launched QNX Cabin, an innovative solution that virtualizes development of digital cockpits in the cloud. It enables original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) to create refined, interactive, and functional in-cabin experiences with reduced development time and costs. Recently, QNX partnered with Unity to deliver a compelling demo at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) showcasing the future of the in-car experience.
We spoke with Sheridan Ethier, VP of Engineering, and Jasmin Mulaosmanovic, Senior Director of Product Management, at QNX to learn how QNX Cabin is poised to redefine how automotive cockpits are developed.
Q: Can you tell us about QNX and what products you develop for the automotive industry?
Ethier: QNX is a Canadian company founded in 1980 and headquartered in Ottawa, Ontario. We’re all about delivering mission critical software and amplifying technology-driven industries like automotive, medical devices, industrial controls, robotics, commercial vehicles, rail, aerospace and defense. We just celebrated our 45th anniversary, with a track record of delivering safe and secure operating systems, hypervisors, middleware, solutions, and development tools, along with support and services delivered by trusted embedded software experts. QNX technology has been deployed in the world’s most critical embedded systems, including more than 255 million vehicles on the road today.
Q: What is QNX Cabin?
Mulaosmanovic: Digital cockpits are a huge factor in many consumers' purchasing decisions when they are in the market for a new car, so we wanted to create a cloud-first development solution that enables developers to easily deliver next generation in-cabin systems. QNX Cabin is a development environment solution for OEMs to develop digital cockpits that effortlessly transition between cloud-based and SoC-based environments. It comprises a QNX product portfolio with additional components to reduce development costs and accelerate time-to-market.
Q: What problems is QNX Cabin solving for?
Mulaosmanovic: There are a few primary challenges we are solving for when it comes to development of vehicle cockpit experiences.
First is reducing development costs and time-to-market. OEMs and Tier 1’s are investing heavily in vehicle cockpit experiences that include the instrument cluster and the infotainment screens used by both the driver and their passengers. It's critical that they manage development costs while still accounting for management of feature sets and costs across different makes and models, as well as keeping up with the rapid evolution and churn of the software technologies that make up the infotainment “stack”. QNX Cabin as a development solution solves for this by shifting development to the left, catching problems early with cloud-based digital twins, and reducing development time from years to months so OEMs can get their cockpit experience to the market much faster.
The second challenge is scaling development and testing across global teams. Most OEMs have large, worldwide distributed teams, and moving development to the cloud helps them scale and collaborate globally in the development and testing phases regardless of their physical location.
And the third challenge we’re solving is consolidating fragmented systems. The automotive market is very fragmented and everything is customized, making it hard to standardize technology across the industry. Our QNX Cabin concept provides an example of how you can use industry standards like VirtIO and benchmark technology like Unity’s engine to pull together all the pieces and provide a cohesive in-cabin experience and enable cockpit designers to build - and test - the solution virtually before it exists physically.
Q: How does Unity fit into the delivery of the QNX Cabin experience?
Ethier: The vision of using Unity with QNX Cabin was to showcase what you can do with an advanced graphics runtime environment on top of the QNX Cabin, which you can watch in the video demonstration above.
There are two use cases for using Unity:
- Running Unity directly on the QNX OS
- Running Unity inside of a virtual machine running inside the QNX hypervisor
We have some unique features with the QNX OS and graphics subsystem including rich APIs to be able to control and manage graphical windows or buffers from both native apps and guest virtual machines, so we wanted to put a Unity frontend to that. We created a plugin for Unity to utilize our graphics APIs to be able to manage windows coming from applications running both natively on QNX OS and in guest operating system virtual machines. These applications are then visible in the Unity-powered 3D environment.
It can also be applied to other experiences, for example we recently ran a virtual factory mixed reality demonstration with a real robot integrated with a digital version of the robot in the Unity virtual world. We see a lot of synergies with customers in the automotive space, both for runtime on the QNX OS as well as in general embedded and simulation environments.
Q: Why has QNX chosen to collaborate with Unity for this cabin demo?
Ethier:
The first use for this demo was at the 2025 Consumer Electronics Show- and as you know, everything there needs to be visually impressive. This was running on a huge 81” 5k touch-monitor, and it looked gorgeous with smooth, rich, immersive graphics and 3D animation which was a function of the Unity engine. But more importantly, the demo featured 13 different video playback surfaces-everything from smart mirrors and interactive cameras to screens that are showing live streaming video content to others running industry standard 3D graphics benchmarks. Pulling all of that together in a very visually appealing and interactive format- you could change things like HVAC settings and start and stop playback on the various screens in real time- really drove home the power of QNX Cabin to be able to deliver the next-gen digital cockpit experiences that OEMs are looking for.
Q: What’s the bridge between this Cabin demo and a future real-world application?
Mulaosmanovic: The QNX Cabin concept gives OEMs a tangible glimpse into how digital cockpits can evolve, by visualizing what a future car dashboard will look like before it goes into production, and how interactive they will be. By continuing to collaborate with Unity, we aim to refine these capabilities, not just for automotive production, but also across related industries like robotics, rail transportation, and other digital twin and simulation applications across the Internet of Things.
Discover more
If you’d like to learn more about Unity’s HMI solution and QNX Cabin technology, check out these resources:
