Ford Feature Simulator

We built a custom gaming cabinet with a modular UI to demonstrate features and capabilities of vehicles that would be too dangerous or impossible to experience at a dealer.

The cabinet was designed to be demonstrated at the yearly regional dealer summit at Ford World Headquarters.

Mike built multiple Unity based experiences that supported VR and motion tracking. The apps pulled in remote configuration data and updated the scenes and vehicles in real time. The cabinet was designed to be extended with many experiences and tailored to individual dealership requirements.

We used HTML5’s gampepad api on the HTML hub page for the experience. The user could use the arduino controlled knob to select the menu item in the page. I used a project called UnoJoy to flash the arduino and make it appear as a native USB game controller to the computer that it’s plugged in to. For example if you built a giant arduino powered footpad you could use it to control a website with native browser gamepad api.

Role

  • UX/UI
  • Designed and built the cabinet Fusion 360 and water-jet cut MDF
  • Created an Arduino interface with Ford provided dashboard control to Unity experience
  • Designed and created the “hub” screen experience launcher with node.js to launch .exe’s on the local machine