Acura precision cockpit ~ Good and bad design

Acura Precision Cockpit Previews Next-Generation Interior and Technology Direction

Touchpad with Absolute Positioning

The Acura Precision Cockpit's touchpad uses absolute position mapping for the first time in the driving environment, combining the flexibility and usability of a touchscreen with the comfort and reduced driver distraction of a remote-based approach. A traditional touchscreen approach is intuitive and direct, but forces a compromised placement of the screen close to the driver and out of the driver's natural line-of-sight. A traditional remote-based interface – common in luxury cars – solves these challenges, but the interaction between the remote and the display is often indirect and clumsy.

With absolute positioning, the interaction with the touchpad aligns precisely with the actions on the main display. Every spot on the touchpad is mapped to a specific function on the main display, just like a touchscreen. Favorites are positioned along the bottom, and scrolling is positioned along the outer edges. A tap on the top left corner of the touchpad engages the content on the top left corner of the center display.

"Absolute positioning transforms the touchpad experience, making it personal, intuitive and particularly well-suited for premium, driver-centric, performance machines," said Dave Marek, Acura's executive creative director. "It's also designed to be quickly and easily adopted, as drivers become acclimated and comfortable in minutes."

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Bucking trends, Acura reveals vision of tomorrow’s dashboard

source: Chris Davies

It’s an answer that goes against the grain of what many others in the auto industry are doing. While the modern dashboard is usually a finger-enticing plethora of touchscreens, Acura has eschewed such things with the argument that, though perfect for tablets and smartphones, they’re not especially suited – or safe – for cars. After all, since you need to look where you tap, you have to take your eyes off the road.

The automaker’s new alternative is, ironically, something you might have experimented with on your laptop years ago. The Precision Cockpit concept has a touchpad mounted down low in the center console, positioned just right for your fingertips to dangle atop it when you rest your wrist on the leather pad. It’s topped with a couple of shortcut buttons for Home and Back, with a touch-sensitive scroll strip to its right.

Touchpads aren’t new in cars either – Lexus tried, albeit half-heartedly, to replace its little-loved joystick controller with one – but what makes the difference in Acura’s case is how taps are registered. Dubbed “Absolute Positioning” it’s basically a 1:1 mapping of points on the touchpad to points on the wide 12.3-inch display on top of the dashboard. A tap in the top right corner always refers to what’s in the same spot on the display, for instance.

The idea is that, just as you get familiar with the location of physical buttons on a dashboard over time, so you get used to positions on the touchpad and how they relate to what’s on the screen. According to Acura, it was a matter of minutes before its testers got to grips with the system, in fact.

Both touchpad and center display are positioned for anyone in the front to use. For the driver alone, there’s a second 12.3-inch screen for virtual instrumentation. With a human at the wheel, that shows things like a speedometer and the usual dials you’d expect; when the car is driving itself, under conditions like adaptive cruise control or – in the future – entirely autonomously, it changes considerably.

Similar absolute-mapping on laptops has always been less than ergonomically successful, primarily because the resolution of the display and the content on-screen usually demands smaller movements than are practical on a laptop-scale trackpad. In Acura’s case, the chunky icons are far easier to hit. The display itself is split roughly 60/40 into two panels: a primary display for apps, navigation, and such on the left, and a narrower screen dedicated to music, weather, and notifications on the right.