Predictive User Interface for Cars: The Next Revolution

In the last 150 years, there has been tremendous escalation in terms of economic and innovative growth in the paraphernalia of automobiles. There are auto-manufacturing companies that are taking giant steps towards the next revolution, and lately Mitsubishi has hit the news with such a breakthrough effort.

In an attempt to revolutionize the driving experience in car, Mitsubishi Electric is trying to come up with a predictive user interface. The technology would be able to predict the route of the driver as per the past driving history. In case there happens to be a traffic jam, it will come up with an alternative way, in order to keep up with the internal environment, it will even take care of the air conditioning.

Somewhere around the beginning of 2018, Mitsubishi is expecting to ship its Ultra-simple human-machine interface (HMI) technology. Lately, in an Open House event held in Tokyo, it did reveal its prototype system.

The Mock-up

With a set of three buttons, mounted on the steering wheel, the driver was able to perform 4 major tasks, which were navigating, using phone, air conditioning and controlling audio-visual system. A 44-cm heads-up display (HUD) was build up on the dashboard for viewing the predicted operations like Go to baseball practice ground, Call manager, Tune to music player and so on.

Voice command was also ingrained in the features set, that could be activated via long pressing on either of the buttons. Sugiura from Mitsubishi’s design department said that for navigational control, the voice technology employed is able to sync up on board data with the destination’s data that is stored on cloud.

Generally, operational history is the most vital facet upon which the predictive technology plays around and leveraging this aspect would definitely take the user interface to the next level.