  In automotive domain, operation of secondary tasks like accessing
infotainment system, adjusting air conditioning vents, and side mirrors
distract drivers from driving. Though existing modalities like gesture and
speech recognition systems facilitate undertaking secondary tasks by reducing
duration of eyes off the road, those often require remembering a set of
gestures or screen sequences. In this paper, we have proposed two different
modalities for drivers to virtually touch the dashboard display using a laser
tracker with a mechanical switch and an eye gaze switch. We compared
performances of our proposed modalities against conventional touch modality in
automotive environment by comparing pointing and selection times of
representative secondary task and also analysed effect on driving performance
in terms of deviation from lane, average speed, variation in perceived workload
and system usability. We did not find significant difference in driving and
pointing performance between laser tracking system and existing touchscreen
system. Our result also showed that the driving and pointing performance of the
virtual touch system with eye gaze switch was significantly better than the
same with mechanical switch. We evaluated the efficacy of the proposed virtual
touch system with eye gaze switch inside a real car and investigated acceptance
of the system by professional drivers using qualitative research. The
quantitative and qualitative studies indicated importance of using multimodal
system inside car and highlighted several criteria for acceptance of new
automotive user interface.
