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Designing the future of in-car interactive entertainment

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Sponsored by Icon Incar, IGT-Lab is a research and development project team. We developed an interactive music game for autonomous mobility, and a prototyping pipeline for future in-car entertainment experiences.

Project Overview:

• Project Goal: Design, build, and deliver an in-car interactive entertainment experience using Icon Incar’s proprietary prototyping platform, Isotope. 
  
• Project Client: Icon Incar
  
• Role: Producer, Experience Designer
• Time: 14 Week

Contributions:

• Managed all client facing communications across time zones and facilitated prepared stakeholder meetings with weekly progress updates
• Applied parallel project management approach to initial hardware/software development and switched to agile iterative methods for experience/game development for timely delivery
  
• Designed and built the vehicle simulator/prototyping platform
• Organized and hosted hackathon-style game jam for our prototyping platform to verify our development pipeline in its robustness and effectiveness
  
• Produced detailed documentation around designing and managing a development team for in-car entertainment

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Core experience

The core experience is a rhythm game, augmented to an in-car setting, leveraging the unique features and settings of a vehicle in movement.

We have developed  a 4-player demo game that simulates passengers driving around New York City whilst playing the rhythm game. By pulling recognizable landmark elements of a particular location within the virtual space, we can ground the guests of the real space, while still maintaining the mystical nature of the virtual world we have designed.

We were heavily inspired by Epic Games’ Virtual Concerts, and how music listening opens up to more social interactions. We had to consider the social implications of playing a game in a car, where the in-car entertainment encouraged cooperative, social gameplay, as opposed to an isolated, solo experience.

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Development Process

The main design challenge was to develop a game using Isotope, a Linux-based OS that is specifically designed for prototyping and deploying experiences on to multiple displays for in-car entertainment and experiences.  This meant that we needed a hardware platform that would house Isotope in order for us to test and deploy the games we develop.

I steered the team towards parallel development approach to tackle this unique challenge. In order for this to work, it was critical that the team had a unified vision around what both the software and the hardware would afford. This allowed our team to move forward and make progress without the need to wait for either aspects to complete.

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Hardware (Simulator Platform)

I designed an created a 3D CAD model of a platform using standard truss system segments to go over a raised platform on which we had 4 driving-simulator seats, courtesy of Playseat. 


The idea was that the displays as represented by the flat black boxes mounted on the I-beams, would pivot around the point at which the I-beam connects to the vertical truss pillars. This would simulate “suicide doors”, where the doors of a vehicle open up on either end of the vehicle (A & C pillars). The displays we’d mount on the I-beams would simulate windows of the doors on a car. 

Final Demonstration