Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

"Infrared Curtain" Brings Touchscreen Technology To Cheap Cars

Posted by samzenpus on from the go-ahead-and-touch dept.

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."

5 of 123 comments (clear)

  1. Old Tech by technical_maven · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

    1. Re:Old Tech by Z00L00K · · Score: 4, Informative

      Go back to the HP 150 from 1983.

      That PC had a touch screen using the same tech, and it was a bad idea at that time, the idea of touch screens in some solutions haven't become better. It's OK to have a touch screen on a phone or small handheld device, but in a vehicle in motion it's a traffic hazard. On a PC with a mouse and keyboard it's just stupid.

      --
      If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
  2. This is So old... by j3p0 · · Score: 5, Informative

    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
  3. HP110 and HP150 in the 1980s? by gwolf · · Score: 3, Informative

    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.

  4. Make that 1972 by SIGBUS · · Score: 3, Informative

    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!