Look over to the climate controls, then take your hand off the wheel and move it slightly upward. The car responds by notching up the heat a few degrees. Sounds like in-car Kinect? That’s the magic behind the Hyundai HCD-14: eye tracking, gesture recognition, and smart software.
These controls, which are possibly the next big thing in dashboard interaction, made the HDC-14 Genesis concept car the hit of the North American International Auto Show — even if most people never got past ogling the impossibly sleek exterior. Some details are sketchy because the HDC-14 was finished just two days before the show and the electrically-powered suicide doors overheated, limiting how many people could actually hop in and see the cockpit.
Here’s how the cockpit control system works:
The HCD-14 has four front-seat displays: a free-form center stack display of about 10 inches, a head-up display, a digital instrument panel, and a driver information display to the left of the instrument panel. A pair of cameras in the steering wheel tracks the driver’s eyes. Once the car sees the eyes glance at an area of the center stack with its climate control, infotainment, phone and navigation areas, it determines which specific control you want. A second set of sensors tracks your hand movement. A hand gesture — such as pointing, raising or lowering the hand, pinching or spreading, swiping left or right, or rotating clockwise or counterclockwise — could adjust the volume, zoom in on a display, flick to a new page, adjust the speed of the fan, or scroll through a phone contact list.
The eye tracking system was developed with Tobii
of Sweden. The week before, the company released Tobii REX for Windows 8
PCs that ”enables users to control the computer by combining their eye
gaze with other controls, such as touch, mouse and keyboard.” REX is
based on Tobii Gaze software announced a year earlier.Hyundai says the Soft Connect gesture recognition system picks up hand gestures from sensors that look down from the headliner. It works much like Microsoft Kinect gesture recognition.
“You pick a function with eye tracking and then attenuate with gesture recognition,” explains Hyundai designer Mike Barbush. The driver could also choose to refine the selection with steering wheel buttons or voice controls.
Center stack display for the passenger’s eyes only
In Hyundai’s demo, the center stack display shows photos, movies, even interactive card games. Since this is a concept car, the driver and back seat passengers can see it as well, but that’s a small matter of technology that would be changed in a production vehicle.Similarly, the show car head-up display is in the middle of the windshield (the dark area just above the center stack display in the adjacent photo) and has a wide viewing angle; in a production car it would be in line with the driver’s straight-ahead view. Information for the driver only lives in a fourth display to the left of the steering wheel. In a production car it might be brought back into the main instrument panel, which now is just an analog speedometer, analog clock, and LED bars indicating engine RPM and temperature.
Will the HCD-14 Genesis be a real car one day?
Because this is the HCD-14 Genesis,
there’s speculation this is the stalking horse for the next Hyundai
Genesis sedan, a luxury car that currently offers most of the features
of a $60,000 Audi, BMW, Lexus or Mercedes-Benz for $40,000. This is not
the same as, say, the Acura MDX SUV concept shown a few stands over that
is effectively the 2014 MDX. The HCD-14 uses a rear-hinged door that
automakers call a “coach door” and everyone else calls a suicide door:
If you step out while the car is moving or if another car hits the door
while you’re exiting, you’re in trouble. There is no center pillar,
which affects door-sealing every day and safety if you’re hit from the
side.The concept car is big for a Genesis and the massive front grille is overly large for the car it’s affixed to (look up garish in the dictionary). More likely it could be a competitor in the big-bucks, high-end-four-door-coupe segment pioneered by the Mercedes-Benz CLK and now populated as well by Audi and BMW. Hyundai says it’s rear-drive with a Hyundai Tau V engine.
As for the eye tracking, gesture recognition software on a production vehicle, Hyundai says it hasn’t talked with the government about safety aspects. It’s not clear the government has to be involved but it likely will be under the broad heading of driver distraction. As Hyundai sees it, everything its tracking-and-recognition tools do, you can do with traditional knobs, or by voice recognition. Hyundai could also argue that if you’ve worked with Xbox Kinect, you’d worked with this new Hyundai.
If it’s anything like BMW iDrive, Cadillac CUE, or any cockpit control method of the past decade, it will likely work perfectly in the lab at the hands of the engineers, and take a while for the buying public to warm up.
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