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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.
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.
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And just like back then, they can still only recognise up to two points (or more accurately, two corners of a rectangle, with no way of knowing which two. But that's probably enough for a zoom or rotate gesture.)
It's still commonly used in digital whiteboards, e.g. in classrooms. There are even companies that retrofit IR touch frames on non-interactive displays. It's finally dying in that market because Microsoft now requires full multitouch capability for modern Windows compatibility.
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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.
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!
Another problem is that response goes way down when you get close to the bezel. I have a touchscreen monitor that uses this technology that I can't use with Windows because I can't drag in from the screen edges.
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.
That might not be true. I've used more modern versions of this technology recently to turn a 25ft x 8ft video wall into a multi-touch surface for an install I was working on, and the system that we installed could recognize up to 10 simultaneous touches across the surface.
Me and another tech were testing out the capabilities using MS paint software, and it would recognize each finger on both hands. Once we added an eleventh simultaneous finger to the mix, it wouldn't recognize it. I think it was more limited to the software driver than the hardware capabilites though was my impression.
The solution we used was a not a cheap one though, so I'm not sure if the kind being written about would have as good of touch resolve or not, but the technology can handle it.
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.
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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.
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).
By all that is good, I hope my future cars will not suffer from silly additions such as touch screens.
That's exactly what I tried to say: "or more accurately, two corners of a rectangle, with no way of knowing which two."
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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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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.
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