The future of brain-computer interaction: How future cars will interact with their passengers

Abstract

Traditional automotive industry has reached advanced levels of car mechanics, performance, efficiency, and safety. A differentiating factor in future cars would be the embedded and interactive digital technology in the cockpit and under the hood, requiring high levels of interactivity with the occupants. While automotive industry has -in the last few years-rapidly, and successfully assimilated several decades of computing, Artificial Intelligence, and Human Computer Interaction (HCI) principles in autonomous and driver vehicles, they are still limited to traditional interaction paradigms like GUI, touch screens, and speech recognition. In this paper, we look ahead into emerging interaction paradigms, and assess their potential application in future cars. We summarize our findings of critical research regarding promising technologies, namely brain-computer interaction (BCI) as a viable alternative. A literature review was performed for the purposes of understanding the past and present of BCI. This information is used in formulating predictions regarding the nature of future interaction between human brains and the vehicles that transport them.