Distance driving can be mind-numbingly boring, but looking away from the road to text or change songs is a life-or-death gamble. Plus, buttons embedded in the wheel only control a fraction of a car’s functionality. Now German researchers have a wheel prototype that puts everything within reach — no glancing needed.
“If you have gestures on the steering wheel, you spend more time looking at the street,” said Albrecht Schmidt, a computer science professor specializing in human-computer interaction at the University of Stuttgart in Germany who worked on the prototype.