Jaguar Land Rover, University of Cambridge develop 'contactless touchscreen'

MANILA: Jaguar Land Rover and the University of Cambridge engineers have developed a new contactless touchscreen technology that will aid drivers in keeping their eyes on the road and minimize the transmission of viruses and bacteria amid the COVID-19 pandemic.

The patented innovation, which is referred to as the “predictive touch”, utilizes sensors and artificial intelligence (AI) to foresee the designated target of the user on the touchscreen, of whether it involves entertainment settings, temperature controls, or satellite routing, without the touch of a button.

New tech like predictive touch is regarded as another step toward dealing with the broader mobility landscape — from how customers can associate with mobility services to the infrastructure needed to allow completely incorporated, autonomous vehicles in the urban areas, such as Project Vector.

The groundbreaking system is included in the Destination Zero vision of the Jaguar Land Rover. This involves a desire to attain vehicle safety, environmental health, and clean mobility, especially during the new normal where personal hygiene and space are highly prioritized.

Jaguar Land Rover vehicles are already configured to assist in the enhancement of passenger wellbeing, with advancements that include cabin air ionization with PM2.5 filtration for capturing allergens and ultrafine particles, engine noise cancellation, and a driver condition monitor.

On-road trials and laboratory tests demonstrated that the predictive touch technology can decrease the touchscreen interaction time and effort of the driver by up to 50%, aside from reducing viral and bacterial transmission.

Poor or uneven road surfaces can frequently result in vibrations, making it challenging to choose the appropriate button on a touchscreen. This means that the drivers need to keep their eyes away from the road, eventually leading to higher risks of accidents.

The technology utilizes AI to identify the item that the user wants to choose on the screen early in the pointing task, thereby accelerating the interaction.

A gesture tracker utilizes radio frequency-based or vision-based sensors, which are significantly typical in consumer electronics. This combines contextual information like environmental conditions, interface design, and user profile with available information from other sensors, like the eye-gaze tracker to deduce the intent of the user in real-time.

Human Machine Interface Technical Specialist at Jaguar Land Rover Lee Skrypchuk stated that as countries worldwide ease with lockdowns, daily consumer transactions are being done using touchscreens, which involve numerous manufacturing and industrial applications, supermarket self-service checkouts, airport check-ins, ATMs, and cinema or railway tickets.

He also added that this innovation provides people the opportunity to make vehicles safer through the reduction of mental burden on drivers and improvement of the duration that they will spend in focusing on the road ahead.

This software-based technology for contactless interactions has achieved high advancement readiness levels. It can also be smoothly incorporated into interactive displays and existing touchscreens as long as the accurate sensory information is available for the reinforcement of the machine learning algorithm.

Photos from Jaguar Land Rover

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