Autónomo
A Virtual Reality Simulation
of a Self-Driving Car
A Virtual Reality Simulation
of a Self-Driving Car
The automotive consumer journey is one of the most complex of all industries. Current research shows it takes months of research, test-drives, and in-person negotiations before a typical consumer settles on a choice. In turn, this is making car sharing and mobility platforms a more attractive alternative to car ownership. Millennial customers, in particular, are resisting taking part in traditional dealer/buyer negotiations.
Buying a car takes a lot of time. A study from Millward Brown Digital found that shoppers spend four months researching cars online. Another study showed that just 17 out of the 4,002 consumers polled said they were satisfied with the current car-buying process.
Many aspects of the car-buying experience are confusing. 6 out of 10 car buyers are undecided from the onset. To narrow their options, buyers check a wide range of information sources, including manufacturer sites, dealer sites, auto review sites, social media, third-party shopping sites, etc. To complicate matters, information is often inconsistent across different sites.
According to IHS Automotive, shoppers spend an average of three hours in their dealership — with much of that time spent on negotiations and paperwork. Similarly, dealerships create other challenges that could derail a purchase. Current research shows that two-thirds of car shoppers dislike being pressured during the test drive, and 56% prefer being anonymous to the dealership until they lock in their purchase terms ..
Autónomo is a proof of concept for a new car buying experience. Gone are the days when you had to visit multiple dealerships, kick tyres, and drive around the block to buy a car. With Virtual Reality (VR) and Hand Tracking, Autónomo allows users to view information (description, specifications, and performance figures) about the car while also simulating the rider experience all in the comfort of your own space!
Choose a car you like, customise its exteriors and interiors, choose a destination, look around a complete city environment (with roads, bridges, buildings, traffic lights, and more), play music, games, and more on the entertainment system, and most importantly, sit back and relax - the car drives on its own! Autónomo emulates and simulates a feature-complete self-driving experience.
Get the complete self-driving experience - move around and look around just like in a real-life setting, interact with elements of a fully autonomous (Level-5) car, customise these elements to your preference, understand how the car will always choose the most optimal route, and much more - all in a Virtual Reality (VR) environment.
Interact with the simulation just like you would interact with a real object - choose your destination with a single touch on a map, use Gestures to enter/exit the simulation, to control the entertainment system (system has a music library and a simple game), and to choose and customise your car.
Cracking project — gesture technology reaching a level of maturity, that we can finally (almost) "touch the future".
Brilliantly creative use of novel Hand Tracking technologies. Really impressed with what this team was able to achieve!
Although Autónomo's journey is presented as a (traditional) waterfall model, its development model was in fact an iterative one. After an initial planning, resource estimation, and risk analysis phase, we repeated each development stage multiple times, with each subsequent completion of the cycle incrementally improving the software. This helped us quickly recognise and implement enhancements — giving us the ability to rapidly adapt to the needs of the project and our partners — while providing us a swifter turnaround after each iteration.