The “intelligent” car is something virtually every automaker is working on at the moment, but that didn’t stop a group of students from Japan’s Tsukuba University from coming up with their own quirky invention: meet the Homunculus, a car that’s “based on a new concept of interactions between humans and vehicles. It promotes and augments non-verbal communicability humans in vehicles.”
The vehicle is actually pretty awesome, as it tries to follows your behavior in three ways. It mimics your
– eye movements (through an in-car eye-tracking system and “robotic eyes” placed in front of the car)
– gestures (through a camera capturing the way you move your hands and and a projector showing a virtual hand on the street)
– “haptic communication” (through IR distance sensors on the outside of the car sending signals to feedback motors attached to your arm)
This video provides more insight (it’s completely in English):
Via Asiajin [ENG]