BMW invented the Kink app but it’s not what you think
BMW car had a dream: It wanted to help its owner discover twists and turns in a new and fascinating way. It will require a huge amount of computing power and tens of thousands of photos, but all that work has paid off. Now, BMW owners can satisfy their rush by navigating the roads shaped like the bends in the rear windows of their vehicles.
You may be wondering why this particularly strange design language from BMW was chosen for this project. Real Bimmers knows that BMW is known not only for the iconic kidney grille design, but also for the slightly curved rear windows on the car’s rear pillars (at least according to BMW).
Known as the Hofmeister Kink, the rear window bend was first incorporated into BMWs by designer Wilhelm Hofmeister and for the past 60 years, Kink has appeared on every BMW rear post. App that allows owners to search for Kinks on roads near them and even look for their specific model year window engraved in the infrastructure form.
It’s remarkable how much work and expertise has gone into this joyful celebration of the automaker’s history. From the press release:
To identify every Hofmeister Kink-shaped road around the country, the first step was to use images of each BMW model manufactured since 1962 to create vectorized versions of the ‘folded road’ shape. individual segment’ of each vehicle model. Sixty-four vectorized ‘buckling curves’ resulted in a custom-built synthetic AI training set consisting of 30,720 images powered by Google Colab for machine learning and open source neural framework, Darknet, to calculate.
From there, the job was to train the model using a synthetic training set, running detections across the highly complex US road network spanning more than 3.9 million miles. When asked about the project, Ian Mackenzie, Creative Director, Performing Arts said:
“Using AI to detect and map Hofmeister Kink-shaped curves on a US roadway isn’t some sort of groping task – it’s a needle quest in 10,000 haystacks.” The team turned to YOLO v4, a complex neural network that detects and recognizes objects and shapes in real time, to identify Hofmeister Kink-shaped roads across the country at high speed and amazing accuracy.
The team performed dozens of AI training sessions to determine the highest possible number of ‘kinks’ while maximizing confidence in the results.
The final step is to extract the AI results as +56,000 geographic coordinates that will power the Hofmeister Kink engine and use aerial photography and satellite imagery to visualize each bend from coast to coast using the MapBox API.
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All that work means BMW owners can find a Kink pretty much anywhere in the U.S.:
And if you want to drive your model’s specific Kink anywhere in the U.S., like on a BMW 4 Series Gran Coupefor example, you will probably find a route at least in your state, if not near:
Now it’s just good old fashioned German fun.