Who Wants to be a Self-driving Car?

self-driving cars

autonomous technologies

XR experiences

VR/AR

speculative design

concept car

Project Host

Move Lab

Project Lead & Concept

Joey Lee

Concept

Benedikt Groß

Concept & Photo

Raphael Reimann

Video, Direction & Production

David Leonard

Concept & Technology

MESO Digital Interiors - Sebastian Oschatz, Theron Burger, Nikos Mechanezidis, Johannes Lemke, Sebastian Kujas, Timon Skerutsch, Urs Hoffmann, Johannes Busch, Daniel Neumayr, Julius S., Benjamin Schieck, & Alexander Teczar


“Who Wants to be a Self-driving Car?” is a data driven trust exercise that uses augmented reality to help people empathise with self-driving vehicle systems. We built an unconventional driving machine that lets people use real-time, three dimensional mapping and object recognition displayed in a virtual reality headset to navigate through space.

The project aims to be a prototype for empathy, creating situations in which the driver and nearby bystanders become part of a conversation about responsibility, fascination and perhaps, hope for a world that is moving towards autonomous mobility.

A controller is used to steer, accelerate, and stop the machine as well as change the view mode of the VR headset. The VR experience is created using data collected by the sensors outfitted on the driving machine. The main view is a presentation of data from a 3D depth camera that uses stereoscopic imaging with image recognition to map and augment the landscape in real time.

“Who wants to be a self-driving car?” is a tool to explore the technology behind self-driving cars from a human perspective. The project is intended to be used as an accessible platform for all people to share their perceptions, feelings, and thoughts on the many ways that sensors, data, computation and mobility are intertwined.


→ See the project Meso Design