Digital dashboards are now standard in both traditional and electric vehicles, yet most still replicate analog layouts, limiting the expressive potential of digital media and affecting how drivers interpret information. As ADAS, automation, and software-defined systems evolve, these interfaces often fail to align with drivers’ cognitive needs for awareness, trust, and understanding.

As automotive cabins evolve into shared living spaces, current in-car entertainment (ICE) systems remain largely screen-centric, promoting individual consumption. This paper introduces BonGO, a car-native system designed to enable collaborative phygital interaction among passengers. Using a research-through-design approach, the study combines exploratory research, prototyping, and experiential evaluation to investigate alternative interaction paradigms. BonGO integrates tangible controllers, a shared console, and multimodal feedback to support activities such as interactive storytelling and shared music curation. Results from a prototype with 30 participants show increased engagement and social interaction, while highlighting challenges in usability, accessibility, and safety.

This paper presents Cloud-9, a multimodal interaction paradigm for assisted parking that reorganizes existing capabilities into a graduated, driver-controlled support model. Cloud-9 consolidates guidance on a single dashboard display, combining visual overlays, textual cues, and auditory feedback to reduce attentional fragmentation. A preliminary simulator study with 40 participants showed reduced cognitive load, and high willingness to adopt guidance-based assistance in everyday driving.

Limited studies exist that explore motionbased touchless applications for children with ASD (Autism Spectrum Disorder) and investigate their design issues and the benefits they can bring to this target group. The paper reports a structured set of design guidelines that distill our experience gained from empirical studies and collaborations with therapeutic centers. These heuristics informed the design of three touchless games that were evaluated in a controlled study involving medium functioning ASD children at a therapeutic center. Our findings confirm the potential of motionbased touchless applications games for technologyenhanced interventions for this target group.

Our research explores the integration of motion-based touchless interaction with human-robots interaction to support game-based learning for children with intellectual disability. The paper discusses the design challenges of this novel approach and presents the design concepts of our initial prototypes.

With the increasingly low cost of motion-sensing technology, touchless interactive interfaces may become a new ingredient in the evolution of content intensive web applications from single-platform (desktop) to multi-platforms use. While the migration from desktop to mobile devices has been widely studied, there is limited understanding on how to include touchless interfaces in this "going multi-channel" evolution. The paper focuses on the design issues that are induced by this process. We propose a model-based design approach that supports information reuse and exploits a systematic mapping from content structures to interaction tasks and touchless gestures. We then describe a case study in the cultural heritage domain to exemplify our method.

Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) has become the fastest growing disability in the United States in 2013. The disorder is characterized by a triad of symptoms related to lack of social interaction, deficits in the acquisition and expression of language, and repetitive patterns of behavior often accompanied by sensorimotor impairments. In our research, we explore the use of motion based touchless games for ASD children and develop innovative tools that can be autonomously used by teachers/therapists in school classes or therapeutic activities. The paper describes the design and preliminary evaluation of "Pixel Balance", a motion based touchless game conceived to promote imitative capability, body schema awareness, and social skills in ASD children.

Our understanding of the effectiveness of motion-based touchless games for autistic children is limited, because of the small amount of empirical studies and the limits of our current knowledge on autism. This paper offers two contributions. First, we provide a survey and a discussion of the existing literature. Second, we describe a field study that extends the current body of empirical evidence of the potential benefits of touchless motion-based gaming for autistic children. Our research involved five autistic children and one therapist in the experimentation of a set of Kinect games at a therapeutic center for a period of two and a half months. Using standardized therapeutic tests, observations during game sessions, and video analysis of over 20 hours of children's activities, we evaluated the learning benefits in relationship to attentional skills and explored several factors in the emotional and behavioral sphere. Our findings show improvements of the considered learning variables and help us to better understand how autistic children experience motion-based touchless play. Overall, our research sheds a light on the opportunities offered full body touchless games for therapy and education of these special users.

Motion-based touchless interaction empowers users to interact using movements and gestures, and without the burden of physical contact with technology (e.g., data gloves, body markers, or remote controllers). Most motion-based touchless applications are designed for interaction "in-the-large", where users engage with medium or large displays. Our research explores motion-based touchless interaction "in-the- small" that involves only small displays (of the size, for example, of smart phone screens). We have applied this novel paradigm to develop interactive applications for household appliances, discovering that the "in-the-small" feature raises a number of challenging design issues, exemplified in the paper through a case study.