BMW is indulging their inner geek at this year’s Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas (CES 2016), planning to showcase some really interesting technologies they say offer a glimpse of the interior and the user interface of the future cars. These technologies are crammed into a new BMW Vision Car concept.
The main highlights of BMW’s CES 2016 program include the demonstration of an advanced AirTouch system which is a fancier version of the hand gesture control we are fairly familiar with. AirTouch allows the display in a vehicle to be operated like a touchscreen without actually having to make contact with the surface.
The way it works, sensors record the hand movements in the area between the central console and the interior mirror. So you’re going to be waving your arms about a lot, wondering what was the problem with the good old knob.
But AirTouch was not advanced enough for a show like CES 2016, which is why the Germans are also showcasing a new BMW Gesture Control with 3D control in the latest BMW 7 Series. According to BMW: “sensors are installed in the area of the instrument dashboard which respond to hand movements here and therefore permit three-dimensional control. A movement of the hand or a gesture activates the surfaces on the large panorama display.”
The general idea here is to reduce the number of steps needed to make a selection. But the system will probably has a complex learning curve, just like the iDrive system when it was first introduced.
