Taking the touch out of touch screens
Touch screens have proliferated in modern vehicles, offering a great deal of functionality while gathering fingerprints like kudzu on a Kansas cabin. Engineers at Jaguar Land Rover have teamed with Cambridge University to develop what seems like a contradiction in terms: a touchless touch screen.
Touted as a way to cut driver distraction and, in these pandemic times, reduce the spread of bacteria, the patented technology is officially called predictive touch by its development team. The tech uses artificial intelligence to determine the item the user intends to select on the screen early in the pointing task, speeding up the interaction.
A gesture-tracker uses vision-based or radio frequency-based sensors to combine contextual information, such as user profile, interface design and environmental conditions, with data available from an eye-gaze tracker to infer the user’s intent. All these sensors will pick up the movement of your arm and attempt to predict the command you’re about to hammer into the touch screen.
The company describes the product as a film, indicating that it could be rolled out and installed on existing infotainment screens. Software changes would also be required.
The development team claims both the film and software can be deployed so long as the correct sensory data is available to support the machine-learning algorithm.
It’s difficult to argue such a setup can reduce the spread of germs.