Designing the future of in-car interactive entertainment
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
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.
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.
Parallel Development
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.
Ideation
I pitched an ideation exercise to the team, where we would explore brands not traditionally associated with cars to see if we could build an engaging experience that would present a compelling idea for these brands to expand into the auto space.
After discussing internally with the team and our clients at ICON Incar, we decided to pursue the interactive music game inspired by Epic Games’ Fortnite Festival.
Largely due to time constraints, we decided to focus on developing the core game element of the experience, which would be a rhythm game that can be played cooperatively.
Hardware (Simulator Platform)
While the designing and developing of the core experience was underway,
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
Software
Building a rhythm game within Unity for Linux proved to be a difficult challenge. We initially used a MIDI reading plug-in to read MIDI files that would allow Unity to:
1. Playback the music
2. Spawn beat objects
3. Detect when the object is hit at the correct time
I created a MIDI file that contained a music file, and two tracks separated on two different octaves to denote when the objects should be spawned and when Unity should check for keyboard input.
The idea was that there would be four uniquely colored shapes that would approach the “car” (players), and the players will have to break them to the beat of the music. The four shapes could be assigned to a single player, or up to 4 players with one shape assigned to 1 player.
Unfortunately, the plug-in did not work with Linux. As we were tight on time, I suggested pivoting away from the finding a work around using MIDI files, to creating a simple collision box that would trigger and break the beat objects as they approached the players.
Prototyping Pipeline & Hackathon
As we had built a bespoke hardware platform, we also developed a Unity development pipeline that would allow future designers and developers to use the platform we had built to deploy their experiences with minimum friction.In order to test the robustness of the pipeline, we hosted a hackathon/game jam, where we invited students to: design, develop, and deploy 2-4 multiplayer game that can be played inside a car, using our prototyping pipeline and platform.
This resulted in 3 games that were developed under tight time constraints.
Project Website
Design Documentation