Designing Mid-Air Haptic Gesture Controlled User Interfaces for Cars
This work addresses driver safety by reducing distraction through in-vehicle infotainment systems, but it is incremental as it builds on existing gesture and haptic technologies.
The paper tackled the problem of driver distraction in cars by designing a mid-air haptic gesture-controlled user interface, resulting in a final prototype with selected gesture and haptic sets based on iterative testing and design guidelines.
We present advancements in the design and development of in-vehicle infotainment systems that utilize gesture input and ultrasonic mid-air haptic feedback. Such systems employ state-of-the-art hand tracking technology and novel haptic feedback technology and promise to reduce driver distraction while performing a secondary task therefore cutting the risk of road accidents. In this paper, we document design process considerations during the development of a mid-air haptic gesture-enabled user interface for human-vehicle-interactions. This includes an online survey, business development insights, background research, and an agile framework component with three prototype iterations and user-testing on a simplified driving simulator. We report on the reasoning that led to the convergence of the chosen gesture-input and haptic-feedback sets used in the final prototype, discuss the lessons learned, and give hints and tips that act as design guidelines for future research and development of this technology in cars.