Toyota and Microsoft working on driver gesture recognition (no, not those gestures)

Raise your hand, palm up, and the radio volume in your car goes up. Toyota sees gesture recognition as one way to reduce the complexity of cars. Not for steering and braking, but to deal with the secondary controls such as infotainment, navigation, or your cellphone. So says Jim Lentz, head of Toyota in the US. The goal is to reduce driver distraction. Toyota’s Board of Awesomeness (seriously) research team is working with Microsoft, a company that has spent years trying to reduce crashes. Their research vehicle is an electric skateboard with a Windows 8 tablet and Kinect motion sensing software (pictured below). In this case, raising or lowering the rider’s hand changes the speed. So, probably, does falling off. This is all theoretical research right now while Toyota and Lexus soldier ahead in production cars with touchscreens, voice recognition, the Entune/Enform infotainment interface, and Remote Touch, the haptic feedback joystick-like device on some Lexuses that controls the LCD display. “Imagine a dashboard where there are no buttons to push… no screens to tap… and your eyes can remain focused on the road. That’s exactly what Toyota is working on,” Lentz said in a speech at the recent Los Angeles Auto Show. “This could potentially work in conjunction with voice recognition which sometimes can be hindered by accents or mispronunciations. Hand gestures are pretty universal,” Lentz added. “I’ll wait for a few seconds while you insert your own punch line.” Separately, Lentz said Toyota in Japan is prototyping the Smart Insect (pictured right), a single-passenger electric vehicle with cameras facing inside and outside the car, gesture and voice recognition, motion sensors, and behavior predictions. For instance: Walk up to the car and it recognizes the driver’s face, blinks the headlamps, and unlocks and opens the doors. Sit down and the car says “Hello” or whatever the driver desires. Think custom ringtones-plus. Gesture recognition and the Smart Insect, Lentz says, “are just a few examples of the many types of mobility automakers are creating for a better tomorrow.”