Photo credit: Paul Wilkinson
A nod’s as good as a wink to a blind horse they say, but you don’t want to go confusing your car with too many facial gestures.
Actually, your current vehicle won’t know the difference between a nod and a wink anymore than one of our visually impaired equine friends…
Having said that, this might not always be the case. Those boffins at the in car entertainment firm Harman are working on a system which will let you control things such as your radio, your in car heating and your sat nav with no more than facial gestures.
Keep on Nodding To Pump Up the Volume
It works through the use of those good old infra red sensors and for the time being the idea is that a wink will turn on or off the radio while nodding to either side will increase or decrease the volume of the music, and so on.
This sounds like a great safety measure to keep us looking at the road and the only problem I can find with this idea is that I am a very restless driver who tends to move about a lot. I clearly recall one day I was out driving in Belfast and one of my favourite songs came on the radio.
I started jumping about behind the wheel until I saw the stern and rather pitying look a woman waiting to cross the road was giving me. As I was a grown man wearing a nice suit at the time I can understand why she was disappointed to see me change into one of the Beastie Boys for a few seconds on a normal street in Ulster. She was carrying a bag full of oranges, so I could tell that common sense and a lot of vitamin C were important in her life.
If I try to move around like this with one of these new fangled systems I will probably blow the blooming thing up with so much head nodding and shoulder jiving