Atmel Unveils Curved Touch-centric Center Console

Today's car dashboards are nothing like the dashboards from a couple of decades ago, and have become much more sophisticated, featuring digital displays, performance dash-cams, touch screens, GPS devices, that are there to ease navigation, provide the driver with data on their car's performance, and provide entertainment for the car's occupants. Since it's quite obvious that technology will only continue to advance in the future, it's safe to say that dashboards won't stay the same and will undergo much more radical changes in years to come. In fact, some of those changes have already been introduced, with various car makers offering smartphone-integrated dashboards, and many tech companies working on futuristic dashboard concepts.

One such company that intends to revolutionize the way dashboards look is Atmel, a prominent semiconductor manufacturer. For a long time, they have been developing various products that are specifically designed to be used in the auto industry, including touch control. The latest product they have been working on is a curved touch-centric center console, which they unveiled recently at this year's CES in Las Vegas. It's called the AvantCar Concept, that features Atmel's XSense Flexible Touch Sensor Technology, and the company claims that it presents the future of human-machine interfaces.

Atmel says that this concept was inspired by the fact that the demand for center consoles that offer the same experience that smartphones and tablets do among drivers is constantly increasing. As the company said in a press release, since these mobile devices have capacitive touchscreens, with sliders, and navigation menus that you can access through touch buttons, they wanted to create a center console that drivers can use the same way they use their smartphones and tablets. That's how they have come up with an idea to build a center console that features two large curved touchscreen displays, with no mechanical buttons, which drivers can use to access various applications, such as GPS, climate controls, audio controls, and so on.

The console involves several innovative technologies developed by Atmel, such as LIN connectivity, that provides local interconnectivity, proximity sensors for driver recognition, that allow drivers to turn the lights on or off, check the thermostat, and control other vehicle systems while driving. This is a very intuitive user interface, which detects when your hand is approaching the screen, so that you can hit a certain button more accurately. Then, there is the personalization option, courtesy of Atmel's LIN solutions, which is convenient in case there are other drivers in your family that use your car, so they can all personalize the ambient lighting in your car, and each time a different driver gets in, the lighting automatically changes to the color they have chosen previously. Additionally, some of the features, that are only used for entertainment purposes, will only be available to passengers, so that drivers are not distracted by them.

Although it's only a concept at the moment, the curved touch-centric center console by Atmel may well be installed in production vehicles in the future, and it's a good example of how car dashboards might look like in the future.