Gestural Interaction With In-Vehicle Audio and Climate Controls

Among the most distractive in-vehicle interactions are audio and climate controls. If these interactions were as easy and spontaneous as natural language, driving could be much safer. Through this research it was found that drivers preferred gestural language to voice language when the control was simple and re-petitive; subsequently, gestural interactions with secondary in-vehicle tasks were investigated. Following the principle of “eyes on the road and hands on the wheel”, a steering wheel design with two touch pads on the wheel to recognize gestures was conceived. The physical design of the steering wheel incorporated good ergonomics and anthropometric data, while gesture stereotypes assigned to a number of in-vehicle controls were determined empirically by two experiments. The new steering wheel design does not have any buttons, which may contribute to driver distraction, yet it incorporates 19 functions through natural thumb-gestures. This compares favorably with most current steering wheel designs, which have more than 11 buttons and 13 functions on the average