Playing charades with your car - The potential of free-form and contact-based gestural interfaces for human vehicle interaction

Modern cars include a host of secondary in-vehicle technology that requires control by the driver. Center-stack touch-screen displays are a popular way to accommodate the proliferation of additional functions through a flexible and scalable interface. However, touch-screens require visual attention for manual selection and provide poor tactile feedback to the driver, which can pose a significant risk while the vehicle is in motion. Inspired by a bimodal control approach, we propose the use of a steering wheel mounted thumb-based gestural interface as part of a larger multi-modal interaction strategy for human vehicle interaction. Following the spirit of Guiard's (1987) model of bimanual control, a small set of simple gestures for the right hand select appropriate functions within the mode selected by the left hand. A pilot study shows promise of this approach over other, free-form gesturebased methods of interaction.