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posted by azrael on Sunday August 10 2014, @09:47PM   Printer-friendly
from the moving-hands-to-drive-car dept.

According to Bloomberg, cars will get Kinect-style hand-gesture controls this year.

SoftKinetic, a Belgian video company that supplies sensors for Sony's PlayStation 4 and Intel devices, has produced a system for operating a vehicle's controls using hand and finger gestures. For example, a driver could move his finger in a circular motion to turn up the volume and then point to the right to pull up a digital map.

I was hoping for something that would automatically blow the horn and shout obscenities, but according to the article "A certain finger gesture, typically reserved for those rare moments of road rage, probably won't be included in the database". I guess I'll have to keep going old-school for a while.

The article doesn't say any car makers have actually signed on for this.

Additionally carguy writes to share part 1 of a short series on the history of self-driving cars, going back to the 1920's.

"In 1994, the VaMP and its twin the VITA-2 (both based on Mercedes-Banz 500 SEL saloon cars) drove autonomous more than thousand kilometers on the Autoroute A1, the dual-lane motorway to the Paris, Charles de Gaulle airport in France."

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  • (Score: 4, Insightful) by calzone on Sunday August 10 2014, @10:21PM

    by calzone (2181) on Sunday August 10 2014, @10:21PM (#79797) Journal

    What could possibly go wrong?

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    • (Score: 1) by Valkor on Sunday August 10 2014, @10:25PM

      by Valkor (4253) on Sunday August 10 2014, @10:25PM (#79802)

      Nothing this is totally safe!

      • (Score: 2) by frojack on Monday August 11 2014, @12:40AM

        by frojack (1554) on Monday August 11 2014, @12:40AM (#79851) Journal

        Even for Italians?

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    • (Score: 3, Interesting) by kaszz on Sunday August 10 2014, @10:44PM

      by kaszz (4211) on Sunday August 10 2014, @10:44PM (#79819) Journal

      You wave off your grandmother at left. Which the car readily interpretate as turn left and step on the gas. ;)

      Actually this might be a bad idea with a slippery slope. Because manufacturers will end up in the land of ambiguity of what is driving and what isn't. And then the listen-all-everywhere will use it to control your adherence to current agenda.

  • (Score: 4, Insightful) by cafebabe on Sunday August 10 2014, @11:02PM

    by cafebabe (894) on Sunday August 10 2014, @11:02PM (#79824) Journal

    Even ignoring the legality of removing hands from the steering wheel, many drivers use hand signalling exclusively for real-time communication with other drivers. Some gestures are quite universal. Some are area specific. However, few are positive or polite.

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  • (Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Monday August 11 2014, @06:41AM

    by maxwell demon (1608) on Monday August 11 2014, @06:41AM (#79941) Journal

    I wonder if Daimler, the maker of Mercedes Benz, sued them for trademark infringement over the name "Mercedes Banz" ;-)

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