Driverless car responds to gestures and facial expressions

(8 Jan 2020) LEAD IN:

In the autonomous vehicle future that the auto industry says is just around the corner, what will passengers get up to while getting from A to B?

If BMW's on the money, they'll sit back, relax, watch a movie or even have a snooze, and at CES the carmaker has unveiled how it imagines car interiors will be built to accommodate it all.



STORY-LINE:

Could this be what the cockpit of cars will look like when we drive autonomously in the future?

BMW is showing its "BMW i Interaction EASE" concept car at the CES gadget show in Las Vegas.

The design concept is the German carmaker's vision of what we'll be travelling in once autonomous cars become mainstream.

The company says the car will be a space for communication - incorporating natural voice, gaze and gesture control to the interior display technologies.

Smart surfaces respond to the people inside - with ambient lighting, and a home theatre.

The glass sides can also change from transparent to blacked out when passengers require privacy.  

"BMW's ambition has always been to be technologically savvy, but we build technology that really serves humans, that feels natural. And while this exhibit is really about is humane technology, it's natural interaction," explains Christoph Grote, BMW's Senior Vice-President, Electronics.

"You can interact with this car by gaze, by gestures, by speech, and it'll understand you in the actual context that the car's actually moving through. This is technology really serving humans."

The cockpit is a travelling lounge destined for far into the future.

Nevertheless, BMW says some of the concept car's features will be available in the iNext crossover SUV, due out next year.

"What you will see is you'll find quite a few elements of this in real cars. And I think we do have a track record not to show things for entertainment purposes, but what we show will be real at some point in time," says Grote.

CES, formerly known as the Consumer Electronics Show, runs until Friday 10 January.

More than 170,000 people are expected to attend.



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