Gestural Input on a Touch Screen Steering Wheel in the Media

At CHI 2011 we presented initial  work on how to use gestural input on a multi-touch steering wheel [1]; a 20 second video is also available [2]. The paper described a prototype - a steering wheel where the entire surface is a display and can recognize touch input. The study had two parts. In the first part we identified a natural gesture set for interaction and in the second part we looked at how such interaction impacts the visual demand for the diver. The results in short: using gestural input on the steering wheel reduces the visual demand for the driver.

Shortly after the conference a journalist from discovery news picked the topic up and did some interviews. This resulted in an article: "Touch-Screen Steering Wheel Keeps Eyes on Road" (Discovery News, 6.6.2011)

ACM Tech News mentioned the Discovery News article News (ACM Tech News June 8 2011).
After this it found its way around and appeared more widely than expected :-) examples include

• "Touch-screen steering wheel keeps drivers focused on the road" (Physorg, 6.6.2011)
• "German Researchers Working On Multi-touch Gestures Steering Wheel" (Softsailor, 15.6.2011)
• "New Touchscreen Steering Wheel May Reduce Driver Distractions" (Extreme Tech, 14. 6. 2011)
• "Researchers invent touchscreen steering wheel" (Sympatico.ca, 13.6.2011)
• "Touch Screen Steering Wheel Aims To Improve Driving Safety" (PSFK, 13.6.2011)
• "Researchers working on Touch Schreen Steering Wheel" (Pistonheads, 13.6.2011)

 There were also a German article "Touchscreen-Lenkrad Wischen wechselt Radiosender" (sp-x, 14.6.2011), e.g. found in:

• http://www.n-tv.de/auto/Wischen-wechselt-Radiosender-article3572276.html
• http://www.auto.de/magazin/showArticle/article/55371/Touchscreen-Lenkrad-Wischen-wechselt-Radiosender
• http://www.focus.de/auto/news/touchscreen-lenkrad-wischen-wechselt-radiosender_aid_636714.html

[1] Tanja Döring, Dagmar Kern, Paul Marshall, Max Pfeiffer, Johannes Schöning, Volker Gruhn, and Albrecht Schmidt. 2011. Gestural interaction on the steering wheel: reducing the visual demand. In Proceedings of the 2011 annual conference on Human factors in computing systems (CHI '11). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 483-492. DOI=10.1145/1978942.1979010 http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1978942.1979010

[2] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R_32jOlQY7E Gestural Interaction on the Steering Wheel - Reducing the Visual Demand. chi2011madness Video.