Haptic In-Vehicle Gesture Controls

Recent efforts have proposed the use of hand gestures to control in-vehicle infotainment systems (IVISs) in an attempt to reduce visual demand and therefore reduce crash risk. These efforts however lack tactile feedback resulting in a decreased sense of control over the user's intended actions. Here, we describe a demo that uses commercially available novel technologies which mitigate this problem by using focused ultrasound to accurately deliver a radiation force onto the user's operating hand. This new paradigm of mid-air haptic feedback presents new opportunities and challenges towards designing effective interaction languages for IVISs. In this paper, we describe our demo prototype and how it addresses some of these challenges.