Designed by:

Luke Medlock

Viso is a new way of looking at driver-vehicle interaction. We live in a time where more gadgets are added to increase safety, but what if less is more?

Viso is a virtual interface for a car dashboard that removes the distraction of precision interaction needed to operate a modern car’s features. Instead, it is controlled through voice and gestures alone to produce not only a simpler and safer approach to driving, but a more humanistic and natural way to interact with our cars.

Viso houses a lighting system to positively modify driving behaviours, enabling users to subconsciously drive economically and always within the speed limit.

Signs and gesticulations are a way in which we can enhance conversation. So why not apply this to our car dashboards? I programmed in several gestures to control Spotify music as a demonstration of how we can interact with features found in the car without the need for eye contact on the dashboard to press a button, instead simply use different postures of the hand in any space for a safer level of interaction.

With Siri in over 800 million pockets, voice controlling our technology has become the norm. I hand coded an Arduino UNO and EasyVR shield to create my own voice control module. Giving Viso a friendly, calming female voice enables a certain degree of personification helping create the humanistic virtual interface. I used voice control in this project for it’s ease of use and as a way of keeping the user’s eyes fixated on the road and not on the dashboard.

Breaking eye contact travelling at 70mph is the same, in distance, as running across a football pitch blindfolded, twice. Checking your speed to be safe could cause an adverse effect by breaking concentration. Viso’s lighting system engages the driver’s superior colliculus (subconscious response) through peripheral light stimulus. Green is emitted when the driver is in the speed limit OR using low revolutions, red for the opposite. Via colour association, the driver subconsciously changes their behaviour to make the dashboard green.