A Survey on Gestural Interaction in the Car Patrick Lindemann 1 , Marion Koelle 1 , Tobias Stockinger 1 , Stefan Diewald 2 , and Matthias Kranz 1 1 Universit¨ at Passau, Passau, Germany {firstname.lastname}@uni-passau.de 2 Technische Universit¨ at M¨ unchen, Munich, Germany stefan.diewald@tum.de Abstract. Gestural interaction has entered the automotive domain, allowing the driver to control secondary and tertiary functions of the vehicle. The design space ranges from mid-air gestures to surface-based gestures requiring little or no visual attention of the user. In this paper, we present an up-to-date survey on current gestural interaction methods in the vehicle. We here focus on the driver as the user. We discuss applications, advantages and disadvantages of representative approaches. Keywords: gestural interaction, automotive, driver-car interface 1 Introduction The activities performed by a driver in the car can be divided in three categories. Primary tasks are directly related to driving, e.g. steering. Activities that support driving like controlling turn signals are secondary tasks. Infotainment-related activities like radio control make up tertiary tasks. Today’s widespread intercon- nectedness and popular trends e.g. in social media allow for a growing variety of the types of these tertiary tasks. New user needs for intuitive interaction with vehicle systems led to the introduction of gesture controls in the car. Gestures in the car can be utilized for both secondary and tertiary tasks and can be distinguished by different criteria (see classification in table 1). Contact-free gestures have been investigated in the restricted design space of the steering wheel [1] and the gearshift area [3], but also as full-hand, mid-air gestures. These are mostly performed in the area spanned by rear mirror, steering wheel and gearshift [2]. We suggest an approach with a depth camera where the fingers are used while holding (that includes using) the gearshift or resting the hand loosely on it. In contrast to a forefinger-based theremin gearshift interface [3], we plan to utilize all five fingers for a combined micro-gestural and button input. property contact type application type body input gesture size values surface-based non-contact secondary tasks tertiary tasks 1-5 fingers 1-2 hands micro (finger, facial) macro (full hand) Table 1. Classification of in-car gestural interaction methods.