Designing Mid-Air Haptic Gesture Controlled User Interfaces for Cars

TL;DR

This paper details the design and development of a gesture-controlled in-vehicle interface with ultrasonic mid-air haptic feedback, aiming to enhance driver safety by reducing distraction through iterative prototyping and user testing.

Contribution

It introduces a novel mid-air haptic gesture interface for cars, including design considerations, iterative development, and practical guidelines for future implementation.

Findings

Reduced driver distraction in prototype tests

Effective gesture and haptic feedback sets identified

Design guidelines for in-vehicle mid-air interfaces

Abstract

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.