New steering wheel uses touch screen to realize multiple functions

    Long-distance driving is a very boring thing for drivers. They must keep their eyes on the lane and their hands on the steering wheel to keep the vehicle stable. However, many function buttons are integrated on the current steering wheel, so the driver may not pay attention to the vehicle in front when selecting functions. German researchers have recently developed an interesting steering wheel that can perform various functions by sensing the driver's gestures.

    "If you can control the steering wheel with various gestures, you will pay more attention to the lane," the researchers said.

    The steering wheel is made of 11 mm thick acrylic material wrapped around the outer ring of the infrared diode panel. A camera is attached to the bottom of the steering wheel, which reflects signals when the steering wheel surface is touched. The driver can control the radio or navigation functions by making various gestures on the touchscreen steering wheel. These gestures can be achieved with just the thumb, so the driver does not need to take his hands off the steering wheel.

    The inventor said the steering wheel works similarly to Microsoft's Microsoft Surface architecture and can fully interact with the driver.

    In order to make the steering wheel more humane, the researchers surveyed some people on "the corresponding gestures for 20 different functions". In the end, they came up with the following solutions, for example, putting the thumbs together means zooming out the map, and separating them from the merged state means zooming in the map; using the index fingers and thumbs of both hands to draw a triangle means playing music. For some functions that cannot be expressed abstractly with gestures, the first letters of the English words of the function are drawn on the touch screen.

    After the research team programmed the system based on this set of gestures, they tested it on a steering wheel. The experiment showed that people did keep their eyes more on the simulated road ahead rather than on the steering wheel when using this steering wheel.

    This steering wheel can be combined with the head-up display technology in the car to display vehicle and road information directly on the windshield; or it can also be used as a sensor to tell the driver when to turn. In addition, the research team is trying to make the touch screen of this steering wheel thinner and deploy an airbag device in it so that the airbag can easily break the touch screen and pop up to protect it (the acrylic touch screen material will not cause harm to the human body).