Modern cars include a host of secondary in-vehicle technology that requires control by the driver. Center-stack touch-screen displays are a popular way to accommodate the proliferation of additional functions through a flexible and scalable interface. However, touch-screens require visual attention for manual selection and provide poor tactile feedback to the driver, which can pose a significant risk while the vehicle is in motion. Inspired by a bimodal control approach, we propose the use of a steering wheel mounted thumb-based gestural interface as part of a larger multi-modal interaction strategy for human vehicle interaction. Following the spirit of Guiard's (1987) model of bimanual control, a small set of simple gestures for the right hand select appropriate functions within the mode selected by the left hand. A pilot study shows promise of this approach over other, free-form gesturebased methods of interaction.

We compared the precision of simulated-fixed wing aircraft landing approaches with two different head-up display (HUD) formats: a) the MIL-STD-1787B Instrument Landing System and b) a virtual peripherallylocated optical flow ILS HUD. Within each display condition we compared a three second quickened display to a real time non-quickened display. Non-pilot participants used simplified controls to guide a landing simulation under night conditions with extremely poor visibility using Instrument Flight Rules (IFR). Participants followed a non-linear flight and approach path under the two display and quickening conditions. While quickening was found to have no significant effect, the peripheral optical flow ILS afforded greater overall precision in flight path control. The findings suggest an increased ability to extract rate-of-change information from the peripheral optical flow ILS affording improved spatial orientation.