Haptic steering wheel eyed to save lives

The same technology behind the rumbling of your game console's controller may soon help save lives, once it is integrated into a car's steering wheel. Researchers at AT&T Research Labs and Carnegie Mellon University are working on a prototype steering wheel with embedded motors that can give the driver touch feedback. Potentially, the motors can cause the steering wheel to vibrate in a clockwise or counterclockwise pattern as the car nears a turn, tech site Mashable reported. Mashable quoted AT&T researcher Kevin Li as saying these vibration patterns trigger a "human perception trick” that causes the brain to sense a clockwise or counterclockwise motion, which causes the driver to instinctively turn the steering wheel along with it. The technology, which uses haptic feedback, is also used in the vibrating of a smartphone when a call comes in, or the rumbling of an Xbox controller along with explosions in a game. Li said his research showed this could potentially decrease by as much as 10 percent the "eyes off the road" time, at least for younger drivers. "The way I see it, this is basically a sort of 'spidey sense,' where you instinctively feel the presence of on-the-road danger. And you do it without moving your eyes, or your hands," Mashable said. On the other hand, Mashable said the haptic steering wheel can also be used to convey other information to drivers as well. It quoted Li as saying he is working on a haptic seat that lets drivers “feel” a car pass through a blind spot. Such a sensory trick would allow the vibrations to tell drivers where a car is, and how it is moving in relation to them, it said. — LBG, GMA News