Jaguar Land Rover has teamed up with boffins at the University of Cambridge to come up with a new ‛predictive touch’ technology that uses artificial intelligence and sensors to predict a user’s intended target on the touchscreen. Simply hover a finger over the intended functionality and the system will do the rest… apparently.
According to the marque, the project is designed to reduce driver distraction on the road but also improve hygiene within a cabin. If a driver or passenger has no need to physically touch a screen, Covid-19 has a reduced chance fo spreading.
Jaguar Land Rover discovered that poor road surfaces can also make physically touching small icons on screens difficult, requiring the driver to take eyes off the road. With that in mind, the contactless touchscreen technology uses artificial intelligence to determine the item the user intends to select on the screen early in the pointing task, speeding up the interaction. A gesture tracker uses vision-based or radio frequency-based sensors, which are increasingly common in consumer electronics, to combine contextual information such as user profile, interface design and environmental conditions with data available from other sensors, such as an eye-gaze tracker, to infer the user’s intent in real time.
Professor Simon Godsill from Cambridge University’s Department of Engineering led the project. He said: “Touchscreens and other interactive displays are something most people use multiple times per day, but they can be difficult to use while in motion, whether that’s driving a car or changing the music on your phone while you’re running. We also know that certain pathogens can be transmitted via surfaces, so this technology could help reduce the risk for that type of transmission.”
Although not completely new (the Volkswagen Group has used a proximity touchscreen for a few years), Jaguar Land Rover claims lab-tests and on-road trials revealed its predictive touch technology could reduce a driver’s touchscreen interaction effort and time by up to 50%. Although there’s no word on the model that it might debut on.
Keyword: Can’t touch this: Jaguar Land Rover develops contactless touchscreen