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BMW to show how gestures will control the cars of the future
BMW, like a number of other automakers, is keen on showing off its latest tech at CES. This year will be no different as the company plans to demo its AirTouch concept in Las Vegas next week. AirTouch is but one feature of BMW's Vision Car that aims "to demonstrate what the interior and the user interface of the future might look like." More specifically, AirTouch allows passengers to control the car's features with gestures rather than having to interact with a touchscreen. There's still a display that shows navigation, entertainment and communication info, but sensors track hand gestures in the space between the dash and the rear-view mirror rather than requiring taps on the screen.
Lightsquared signs deal with AirTouch, creates its first MVNO
LightSquared added another name to its list of allies yesterday, with a wholesale agreement allowing AirTouch products to dabble in the world of wireless. The phone manufacturer, which makes telecom devices that work with voice, data and video, looks set to become the first newly created MVNO to use LightSquared's 4G goodness. Of course, all this is assuming that the nascent network actually gets off the ground. But now that it's supposedly solved that pesky GPS interference problem, what could possibly stop it?
iPad as Kinect part 2: Air Touches
What can you do with an iPad 2 with its onboard cameras and it's fairly able CPU? Quite a lot, it turns out. When TUAW first looked at Greg Hartstein's Air Touch project, it required a completely dark room and could only handle a single measure of distance based on lighting levels. Things have evolved since then. Hartstein provided this video that shows how using a tracking element attached to his hand (you can see it slightly in the video when his hand is at an angle to the camera) simplifies the interaction and provides a far greater range of possible interactions. Unfortunately, the YouTube video is slightly glitchy (the original version we received is not, but when we uploaded it to YouTube we got that weird pixelation in the beginning). In addition to tracking distance and rotation, Hartstein has also been working on air-swipes and other motion-based gestures.
