ROME – Touchscreens, adopted to reduce the number of physical commands on modern vehicles, cause too many distractions at the wheel and more and more manufacturers are willing to eliminate or drastically reduce them on their cars in favor of technologies that allow maximum interaction between the driver and the car in all safety.
The dominant idea among manufacturers is to resort to advanced head-up displays: that is, those military-derived systems, already in use on many cars, which display information directly on the glass in front of the driver.
Some examples in this sense have already arrived from Volvo and BMW. The Swedish company has developed a sort of “thin multilayer combiner” intended to be integrated into the windshield, making a full-screen view possible without the use of a projector. While the Germans in Munich showed the concept i at the last CES in Las Vegas Vision Dee (Digital E motional Experience) as a preview of the new generation electric vehicles based on the Neue Klasse platform and planned for 2025. Inside, conventional buttons and switches have been completely eliminated, replaced by a Mixed Reality Slider instead of the traditional iDrive which controls a huge HUD with five different settings according to the content to manage.
To work the super HUDs will be able to use different technologies developed by the tech giants. For example, Intel’s Realsense hand tracking, or the fingertip capacitive discharge touchscreen, allowing you to manage the various commands even through the movement of the eyes which can act as a viewfinder and cursor on the glass.
Also at CES 2023, Harman, the automotive subsidiary of Samsung, unveiled the Ready Vision. Combine a HUD with augmented reality and employ machine learning software and artificial intelligence to display only the ‘right and relevant’ information without obstructing the driver’s view. It can then detect objects in real time and provide audio and visual alerts. Once upon a time, certain things were only seen in science fiction films…