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Designing the future of in-car interactive entertainment




Sponsored by Icon Incar, IGT-Lab is a research and development project team, currently developing an interactive in-car game for L5 autonomous mobility in the form of Unity-based immersive and interactive musical rhythm game. 

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

Contributions:

  • Managed all client facing communications and facilitated and 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 game jam style hackathon for our prototyping platform to verify our development pipeline in its robustness and effectiveness


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 are looking to include functionalities for the following features: 

  • Geo-location: Virtual environment reflects elements of the real environment the vehicle is driving through.
  • Driving input: Steering and speed of the real vehicle controls the movement of the vehicle in the viritual space.
  • Time of day: Dynamic environment and skyboxes reflect the current time of day

We are currently developing 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.


Simulator Platform

The project required us to not only design and build the game content, but also to design and build a hardware platform where the game will be played in. 

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. 




Build Process





Project Website