Don’t take your eyes off the road to read new research from the University of Washington.

In partnership with Toyota Research Institute, UW researchers are exploring how modern touch screens in cars affect driving now that dashboard knobs and buttons are increasingly a thing of the past. The results could help auto manufacturers design safer, more responsive screens and in-car interfaces.

The team’s study, which was presented this fall at the ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology in Busan, Korea, adds to what we already know about the dangers of distracted driving when it comes to phone use.

Participants driving a vehicle simulator and interacting with a touch screen (see video above) were given memory tests that mimic the mental effort demanded by traffic conditions and other distractions, the UW reported. Sensors tracked their gaze, finger movements, pupil diameter and electrodermal activity.

While driving, participants had to touch specific targets on a 12-inch touch screen, similar to how they would interact with apps and widgets. They did this while completing three levels of an “N-back task,” a memory test in which the participants hear a series of numbers, 2.5 seconds apart, and have to repeat specific digits. 

Researchers found that when people try to multitask behind the wheel, their driving and their ability to use a touch screen both suffer. The simulator car drifted in its lane, and speed and accuracy using the screen declined while driving.

“Touch screens are widespread today in automobile dashboards, so it is vital to understand how interacting with touch screens affects drivers and driving,” said co-senior author Jacob O. Wobbrock, a UW professor in the Information School. “Our research is some of the first that scientifically examines this issue, suggesting ways for making these interfaces safer and more effective.”

Popular Mechanics wrote about the mental bandwidth and finger precision that many modern infotainment screens require in cars.

Based on the UW/Toyota findings, researchers suggest future in-car touch screen systems might use simple sensors in the car — eye tracking, or touch sensors on the steering wheel — to monitor drivers’ attention and cognitive load. Based on these readings, the car’s system might adjust the touch screen’s interface to make important controls more prominent and safer to access.

When driving around in video games, whether racing games like Mario Kart or open-world games like GTA, the game often displays a mini map in the corner of the screen that shows where the vehicle is in relation to the rest of the playable area. This idea goes back well before the first in-vehicle GPS systems, and although these real-world mini maps are commonplace now, they don’t have the same feel as the mini maps from retro video games. [Garage Tinkering] set out to solve this problem, and do it on minimal hardware.

Before getting to the hardware, though, the map itself needed to be created. [Garage Tinkering] is modeling his mini map on Need For Speed: Underground 2, including layers and waypoints. Through a combination of various open information sources he was able to put together an entire map of the UK and code it for main roads, side roads, waterways, and woodlands, as well as adding in waypoints like car parks, gas/petrol stations, and train stations, and coding their colors and gradients to match that of his favorite retro racing game.

To get this huge and detailed map onto small hardware isn’t an easy task, though. He’s using an ESP32 with a built-in circular screen, which means it can’t store the whole map at once. Instead, the map is split into a grid, each associated with a latitude and longitude, and only the grids that are needed are loaded at any one time. The major concession made for the sake of the hardware was to forgo rotating the grid squares to keep the car icon pointed “up”. Rotating the grids took too much processing power and made the map updates jittery, so instead, the map stays pointed north, and the car icon rotates. This isn’t completely faithful to the game, but it looks much better on this hardware.

The last step was to actually wire it all up, get real GPS data from a receiver, and fit it into the car for real-world use. [Garage Tinkering] has a 350Z that this is going into, which is also period-correct to recreate the aesthetics of this video game. Everything works as expected and loads smoothly, which probably shouldn’t be a surprise given how much time he spent working on the programming. If you’d rather take real-world data into a video game instead of video game data into the real world, we have also seen builds that do things like take Open Street Map data into Minecraft.

Thanks to [Keith] for the tip!

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has identified at least 80 incidents.

From autonomous driving to speech recognition and AI safety, the company aims to drive things forward.

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From autonomous driving to speech recognition and AI safety, the company aims to drive things forward.

The post Nvidia Unveils Advances in Open Digital and Physical AI appeared first on TechRepublic.