Welcome to our week 2 blogpost from IGT-Lab!
We had our first client kick-off meeting on Tuesday, January 23. During the meeting, we went over team and client introductions, client expectations, and possible directions we could take this project.
One of the things that was made clear during the meeting was that Icon Incar was looking for something that people have not seen before in the auto industry. Bringing in our expertise in entertainment was genuinely exciting for both our client and our team.
Among many suggestions, one that got us hooked was looking into well recognized brands outside the auto industry for ideation. This would provide unique opportunities for the client to reach out to sectors outside the automakers that they already have well-established ties with, and also potentially generate experiences that the auto industry has not seen before.
Immediately after the conclusion of our meeting, we set out to come up with ideas focused on specific brands that are seemingly unrelated with cars and mobility.
Ideation
We started by creating a large figma board where we compiled brands and products we were personally interested in, and tried to come up with a high concept idea for each.
The industry sectors ranged from fitness, travel, education, fashion to virtual concerts, like the ones staged by Epic Games.
From those ideas, we picked out 4 brands we liked most, and prepared a slide deck to pitch them to our clients.
The 4 brands were: Airbnb, Epic Games (virtual concerts), BBC, and Duolingo. We tried to keep a diversity in choice, but all of them shared a commonality: Connection to locality.
Since our experience is being designed for ‘mobility’, the location and the environment the user will be in, to us, struck as the most critical component. How can we enrich the mobility experience? We attempted to find an answer by investigating the connection between the place and the person.
The Airbnb idea was about travelers reserving an “Airbnb Ride”, where the passengers are able to give descriptions of the place they might want to stay at. The autonomous Airbnb vehicle will then set a route, on which are several destinations that match the travelers’ requests. The travelers can then experience these distinct Airbnb stays through surround display and sound inside the vehicle before deciding where to stay for their vacation.
The Epic Games virtual concept idea is all about experiencing immersive virtual concert in your own vehicle while on the move. The vehicle alerts the passengers upon entering a local ‘live concert zone’, where the passengers can join and interact with other passengers in other vehicles that have joined the same concert. It’s bringing the privacy and security of being in your own vehicle, much like a drive-in cinema, and the sense of connection in going to a local live music festival together.
The BBC idea is all about giving live and curated local news as the vehicle moves around the city. There are also live projections of the news host that allow greater interaction beyond tapping and scrolling.
Our Duolingo ideas are all about learning the local language as you travel inside a vehicle. Perhaps you want to learn the language of the city you are traveling in. Perhaps you wish to learn more about the place you are currently in. The idea behind Idea 3 with the autonomous driving, is that we can use the image data being retrieved by the cameras on the vehicle, interpret and extract items from the image file, and use them to create a bespoke language learning experience.
For instance, if you are traveling along the coast of Spain, you could be learning dialects and languages of a specific town or region. You could learn about the food that is popular in the city, and learn how to order them in their local language. It could pick out historical landmarks around you using geo-location and car vision to teach you how to speak those objects/landmarks in the local dialect.
The other strength with this idea is that Duolingo is local to Pittsburgh, and we’d be able to take advantage of the extensive connections ETC has to Duolingo, and exchange relevant data around usage patterns, usage during international travels, usage on-the-go, and more.
Tech Updates
We have received the PC with the correct graphics card (Radeon Pro W6800), which will allow us to install the OS file and Isotope to begin working on the gold spike. We have ordered 3 additional touch screens (12″), which we will use to test the setup.
Moving forward
We are planning to pitch the four ideas to our client coming Tuesday, nail down our idea and gain feedback around our idea during quarters as well.