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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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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.
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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.
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
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.
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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