"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."

Comments

Multi touch while driving?

[gstoddart]

Unlike an earlier simpler version of the system, the infrared curtain can also identify multi-touch gestures such as pinching and zooming.

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.

Re:This is So old...

[BarbaraHudson]

The '80s called - this sucked then, it still sucks now.

What's wrong with capacitive touch?

[Opportunist]

If THAT is "too expensive", maybe raise the price of the car by ten bucks or so?

We Don't Need...

[theshowmecanuck]

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.

No thanks

[danomatika]

I'll stick with actual buttons, thank you very much.

Touchscreens Suck for Situation Awareness!

[Irate Engineer]

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.

Re:Touchscreens Suck for Situation Awareness!

[dgatwood]

This. If I had my way, I would ban all touchscreen control systems in cars. They're fundamentally unsafe by design as long as there are humans behind the wheel. If it is unsafe for me to look down at my cell phone and read a text message, it's a hundred times as unsafe for me to look down at my radio, see what channel it is on, scroll through a list of channels, and choose the right one. It is almost as though someone at every auto company simultaneously thought to themselves, "We've been improving the road safety of our cars for three or four decades, and the lower accident rate has meant fewer replacement vehicles. What can we do to cause more car wrecks?"

Touch screens in vechicles = bad idea

[WaffleMonster]

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.

I don't want any touch

[ArchieBunker]

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.