Hyundai's fancy cockpit of the future has lots of touch surfaces

Some automakers have tried to roll touch-sensitive surfaces into the cockpit of cars and trucks on the market today. For drivers, touch-sensitive surfaces tend to be hard to deal with because using them requires you to look away from the road and focus on the button since you can't feel individual buttons. Hyundai has a cockpit of the future that has large touch surfaces on the steering wheel.Hyundai calls this the future of the car's cockpit and has integrated the future tech into an i30 test car. In the new virtual cockpit, the steering wheel has two displays that are larger and ergonomically adjusted. The touchpads can be adapted to the desires of the driver.

Hyundai says that the screens have freely configurable icon design. The screens also have new haptic modules to provide feedback to optimize usability. The haptic feedback also supports the interaction between the steering wheel, center, and multi-layer display.

The instrument cluster is a multi-layer display that can display content on two levels. The MLD has a pair of displays stacked behind each other at 6mm apart. The distance between the two screens supports 3D effects.

Those effects are used to guide the attention of the driver with less distraction. Information on the screens fixed to the steering wheel changes depending on the current instrument panel configuration. The goal is to deliver all the information a driver needs in increasingly complex vehicles with as little distraction as possible.