Let the Apple Car rumors roll on. As evidenced by a newly granted patent (number 10,913,463) for a”gesture based control of autonomous vehicles,” if/when the electric vehicle arrives, it could be controlled by gestures.
In the patent data, Apple notes that autonomous, self-driving vehicles can sense their environment and navigate to destinations with little or no ongoing input from occupants. However, the tech giant notes that occupant input and guidance with regard to selecting vehicle trajectories (without requiring traditional steering, braking, accelerating and the like) may be “extremely valuable” to the motion control components of such vehicles.
Apple says that, however, providing interfaces for such guidance which are intuitive and easy to use may present a non-trivial challenge. The tech giant thinks one solution could involve gesture-based input.
Here’s the summary of the patent: “A triggering condition for initiating an interaction session with an occupant of a vehicle is detected. A display is populated with representations of one or more options for operations associated with the vehicle.
“Based at least in part on an analysis of one or more signals generated by the occupant, a particular option is selected for implementation. An indication that the particular option has been selected is provided, and an operation corresponding to the particular option is initiated.”
