Neil Peart

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IBM's Drumming Car Reads Your Lips. Seriously

The people at IBM are hard at work developing technology we never knew we don't need -- a steering wheel that reads your lips, responds to your facial expressions and turns into a drum machine. Tapping out a beat on the steering wheel while jamming to your favorite tunes will never be the same again. IBM calls it "Artificial Passenger" and says touch-sensitive controls at 10 o'clock and 2 o'clock let you channel Neil Peart while creeping through traffic. If drumming ain't your thing, you can lip-sync to your favorite tune and the steering wheel will knock out some beats based upon the movement of your lips. Goofiness aside, Artificial Passenger has some functions that could be useful. And it's just one more sign that it won't be long before your car is watching -- and responding -- to you. Artificial Passenger is the latest, and perhaps oddest, of the efforts to create a car that keeps tabs on your gestures and physical and emotional state. Stanford University's CarLab is developing a car that monitors the driver's voice, facial expressions and emotions, and MIT's Aware Car is rigged with cameras and infrared sensors that track drivers' eyes and eyelid movements and monitor heart rate, blood pressure and respiration. IBM's project is a bit more, uh, whimsical. A YouTube video shows how sensors in the steering wheel let you produce a variety of somewhat musical sounds or play along with an iPod boombox precariously perched on the dash. (Haven't they heard of iPod integration?) A kid in the video shows how a passenger could be more annoying than usual by tapping out an electronic beat on the door panel or simply by mouthing sounds. (At least the kid's got a better sense of rhythm than the guy driving the car.) It isn't all fun and games though. The ability to read your lips and recognize your gestures means Artificial Passenger can control various functions, such as opening the windows, retracting the sunroof or making a phone call. It's pretty cool, but you have to wonder if there's a need for it since automakers already are consolidating those functions in the steering wheel. With all the research that's being done on monitoring facial expressions and bodily functions behind the wheel, we have to wonder what's next. A car that can read your mind? Photo: Flickr user biblicone.