You Can Touch, but You Can't Look: Interacting with In-Vehicle Systems

Car drivers are nowadays offered a wide array of in-vehicle systems i.e. route guidance systems, climate controls, music players. Such in-vehicle systems often require the driver’s visual attention, but visual workload has shown significant less eyes-on-the-road time and affects driving performance. In this paper, we illustrate and compare three different interaction techniques for in-vehicle systems. We refer to them as tactile, touch, and gesture interaction. The focus of the techniques is the effects on drivers while driving cars. We evaluated the interaction techniques with 16 subjects in two settings. Our results showed that gesture interaction has a significant effect on the number of driver eye glances especially eye fixations of more seconds. However, gesture interaction still required rapid eye glances for hand/eye coordination. On the other hand, touch interaction leads to fast and efficient task completion while tactile interaction seemed inferior to the two other interaction techniques. Author Keywords In-vehicle systems, visual attention, gesture interaction