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"Infrared Curtain" Brings Touchscreen Technology To Cheap Cars
An anonymous reader writes with news about an affordable way to integrate touch screen technology in any car. "Although touchscreen controls are appearing in the dashboards of an increasing number of vehicles, they're still not something that one generally associates with economy cars. That may be about to change, however, as Continental has announced an "infrared curtain" system that could allow for inexpensive multi-touch functionality in any automobile. The infrared curtain consists of a square frame with a series of LEDs along two adjacent sides, and a series of photodiodes along the other two. Each LED emits a beam of infrared light, which is picked up and converted into an electrical signal by the photodiode located in the corresponding spot on the opposite side of the frame."
This is not exactly new technology. Our 2001 Acura MDX used the exact same method. One problem with it was that it tended to become non responsive when it was hit with sunlight... Other than that it worked well.
Not sure why this is news, I was working with this technology back in 2005 as part of touch screen point of sale terminals. The problem with these screens is that any debris or objects on the bottom lip (and there is about 1/4 inch lip) blocks the beam and people can't figure out what is causing the problem.
I was frustrated by these IR touch screens not working so well at the so called Media Bum technology centre in Tokyo as a kid in 1982. Bring on the good screen punching times again I say.
This is so old, I'll bet the patents have expired. I'm sure I saw it close to 20 years ago. The "Anonymous" that suggested it was probably the marketing droid that was responsible for the press release (follow the link) that got some lazy editor to post it on Gizmag.
"A Little Song, A Little Dance, A Little Seltzer Down your Pants" -Chuckles The Clown
This was done back in the 80's on a home security/automation system.
http://www.reddit.com/r/pics/c...
I'm sorry, but pinching and zooming on a multi-touch display seems inherently incompatible with operating a motor vehicle. For a car, steering wheel mounted buttons, easily accessible knobs, and maybe voice control.
Mucking about with a touch screen? Not so much.
Do the people who make cars not actually keep tabs on things like traffic laws and common sense? Or are they just all trying to monetize your dashboard, and don't care?
I'm not sure this would legally comply with most hands free laws.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
If THAT is "too expensive", maybe raise the price of the car by ten bucks or so?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
We don't need any more shit in the car to distract us from what we are supposed to be doing, and that is driving.
-- I ignore anonymous replies to my comments and postings.
I'll stick with actual buttons, thank you very much.
Why the push to have touchscreens in the car in the first place? Use of a touchscreen demands that the driver take their eyes off the road, focus on the touchscreen, touch it in the right spot, and then they can return their attention to the road (hopefully without seeing a gaggle of kids, puppies, nuns, or whatever bouncing off the hood of their car).
Why don't we just put all of the car controls in an app on a smartphone and be done with it, making sure that the driver never focuses on the road?
Tactile buttons and knobs are much safer. You can feel for them, identify them by touch, and manipulate them without taking your attention off the road. Good control designs are unambiguous and easy to find and manipulate.
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Shifters, signals, lights, wipers, gas, break, hazards, fogs, steering..etc are designed to be manipulated by tactile feedback alone. Likewise my audio system was selected for its ability to be fully controllable via tactile feedback.
Driving is not a "game" .. touch interfaces have no place in a vehicle.
What does Bennet think about this amazing idea ?
It ca be made pretty high. A wall of LEDs and photodiodes form the basic scanning unit in a flatbed scanner. They easily go 600 dots per inch or even 1200 dots per inch. So the resolution can be high. But, on the other hand, the distance between the source and the detector seems to be rather large and if the laser beams have to be collimated optically it could be come expensive. It is a nice technology.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Touchscreens are the worst interface for cars. Stop this madness just because it's fashionable. Switches in cars should be identifiable by feel and position, and give a non-visual feedback (i.e. tactile) when operated. Touchscreens do none of that.
Amen: You want controls you identify by touch to do common things so your eyes do NOT leave the road.
First of all, touchscreen is a horrible interface in a car. But leaving that aside, capacitive touch screens are dirt cheap. You can get replacement units (glass and touch sensors) for Chinese Android phones for a few bucks on Alibaba. So there's utterly no reason to prefer an inferior technology for the sake of price.
So they are replacing easily identified and robust mechanical controls with a touchscreen technology that has been falling by the wayside because it is unreliable?
Who wants to bet this is actually a case of some manufacturer having old inventory or excess capacity they need to justify and made some kind of deal to offload these terrible devices by using them in cheap cars.
Next, in 2018 or so, mechanical controls will be the "in" thing only found on nicer cars...
This sounds exactly like the tech used by Hewlett Packard in the mid-1980s (here in Mexico, maybe it was known earlier elsewhere) for their HP110 and HP150 lines. The HP110 had (25x80? Probably...) holes on the screen edge, with a LED and a receiver at the opposite ends. IIRC, for the HP150 the "magic" was that the screen borders were now smooth, because the LEDs were higher power, and infrared instead of visible-spectrum.
I never used those machines; I remember seeing them and drooling at the finger-detecting magic :-) But thirty years later, it's hardly a new technological development.
The PLATO IV terminals from 1972 had such touchscreens as well. Ancient tech indeed.
Oh, no! You have walked into the slavering fangs of a lurking grue!
The original Amazon Kindle Touch and the Nook Simple Touch have used this technology for years. It's a very, very old technology. There's nothing really special about this except that it's being applied to automobiles.
Kriston
I remember "infrared curtain" on old green screen monitors.
Keep touchscreens away from cars. Back in the good old days I could reach down and adjust the air temperature with a slider and fan speed with a knob without taking my eyes off the road. Now I have to navigate menus and read text for the same task.
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
We had an HP150 during the 1980s. It ran MS-DOS 2.11, with an Intel 8088, but was not IBM PC compatible. The touch screen worked quite well, and substituted for a mouse (which the system didn't have - at least, ours didn't). However, since the infrared beams were in front of the screen, it was possible to 'touch' the screen without actually making contact. The actual contact point was a few millimetres off the surface of the screen, but varied in height due to the curve of the CRT. The mechanism was good for keeping fingerprints off the screen, but I can't see it being that good for attempting to touch a screen with your finger hovering nearby in a moving vehicle. A slight bump in the road and you will touch the wrong button without even appearing to make contact with anything. With physical buttons, you can feel for the button and then press it only once your finger is on it. I suspect that this is more attractive to the manufacturer than the driver, since it allows a large number of these to be made and used in many different models, with the buttons being a software not a hardware choice. Lastly, the HP150 system (and so supposedly this one too, although I have not RTFA) was not multi-touch capable, since the locations of two fingers couldn't be unambiguously determined.Place two fingers on the screen on opposite corners of a rectangular area, and the system couldn't determine if the fingers were in fact on the other two corners of the rectangle. The same beams would be interrupted.
The last thing I want is touch screens in my car. I want tactile controls. What the fuck is so terrible about a few knobs and sliders? At least I don't have to look at them while I'm driving.
Another oldie-but-goodie. Twenty-nine years ago, I used Carroll IR touchscreens in 1985 for a hand-coded high-end corporate presentation system with multiple touch-enabled monitors. Given the range of IR in the wild (outside in cars), I'm not sure I'd go this route now... but hey, everybody gets their turn.
This is not exactly new technology.
No, no it's not. I remember an old Byte magazine from the late 70's that had an article discussing how to make a touch screen this very same way.
I've recently been moving around quite a bit, and have rented a few cars. As I've been putting rental orders in at short notice I've had the opportunity to drive a few cars that are usually out of my budget range, higher end Mazda, Ford, BMW and Mercedes. I can say without a doubt that the touchscreen controls in all of these cars are terrible, and actually ruin the experience of driving them. If you are unfamiliar with it then forget making any kind of adjustment while driving.
The car I had in the US, a Dodge Dart, was pretty much perfect. No fancy touchscreen, but still a nice enough finish on the interior. Combination of the useful features, without being overly complex. Manual gearbox (although that's a personal preference, I think autos feel crappy no matter how nice the car).
capacitive touch screen tablets are cheap, why do we need this again?
Makes no sense...
By all that is good, I hope my future cars will not suffer from silly additions such as touch screens.
I HATE TOUCHSCREENS! It is one of the most disgusting technologies. Damn those greasy streaks people love to draw on everything.
Lets be honest, touchscreen is negligible cost when it comes to a car. There is absolutely no good reason to save pennies on that when it has no real impact to the actual cost of the car. The point of depriving cheap cars from nice features(even if they don't cost anything) is to shape market. You pay luxury price for nice features that really don't cost anything. If you put the same features on a cheap car you couldn't sell luxury cars.
What's wrong with regular push buttons and dials?
Don't fix it if it isn't broken!
Political correctness is really just herd psychology pushed by insecure people who desperately seek social conformity.
Standard resistive Touchscreen tech is dirt freaking cheap. I can get 7" resistive types for $9.00 each all day long at single quantities. If I was a car maker I could get them at less than $1.00 each in 1000+ quantities.
Honestly this IR system is a rehash of really old tech that is just not needed.
What is needed is the important buttons existing as REAL HARD BUTTONS. the systems that are 100% touch are complete crap. Yes I do want my hard buttons back on android, the on screen home button is really 100% crap.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
used the infrared curtain concept. It was basically a badass intercom, or a closed loop HAM radio that used fiber optics instead of radio depending on how you want to look at it.
Not super awesome capacitive touchscreen tech - but it's something that will work for gloved or calloused fingers - something touch screens have a problem with. (you have no idea how many bad "drops" I've made on video games because the screen doesn't work on my callouses)
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Cars should ONLY have conventional, physical controls,due to having to actually LOOK AT a touchscreen to use it. Secondly, where has the article writer been for the past year? You can buy a touchscreen 7" tablet for under £45 in the U.K., so the cost price must be around £20.
There is nothing whatsoever wrong with current, physical car controls, and touchscreens WILL result in people being killed. But hey, 'ooh, the shiny' is more important for these 'UX experience' cretins...
I'd be willing to pay more money for a car without touchscreens. I want to be able to operate the controls by feel, without taking my eyes off the road. Besides that, any significant electronic system in a car will quickly become outdated. If the technology is that important to the driving experience, I'll get a mount for my cell phone.
I think the next person who is injured in a car 'accident', or loses a loved one in a car 'accident', caused by somebody trying to use a touchscreen, is going to win a lot of money and get these stupid devices permanently removed from all cars, by law.
Continental finding innovative ways of bringing 1970s technology to customers today!
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Dreadful. Now even buying a cheap car won't give people an escape from this most stupid of technologies.
My sister has a car that's touch screened. Trying to drive and do things on that touch screen is a disaster. Far better to have multifunctional manual controls mounted to the steering column like my 1980s Toyota. No need to look down. Easily changed. Easy to see that mode is on without looking.
Ah, but a touch-screen, particularly with this new type screen, is cheaper. That's what is driving auto companies to adopt it. And the usual idiots, particularly in the media, don't have enough sense to see just how dumb this is. They fall for anything new and think is is better, hence that Gizmag article.