During 2018-19, My team and I worked with Changan Automotive and Mercedes Benz’s research teams on a few conceptual spatial interactions for new age HMI’s. This is a brief description of both projects.

The team consisted of around 5 people (creative technologists, designers and coaches) with me as project and interaction lead. Projects were short engagements, from 4 weeks for Mercedes-Benz and 10 weeks for Changan Automotive.

1. Changan Automotive HMI research team, Turin (Italy)

Changan came to us with a brief around a future concept they were exploring - consisting of contiguous flexible displays and an onboard AI companion as the chief technological base.

Over a few weeks, my team and I tested and built a number of experiential prototypes for them (testing image below), including a conceptual video that highlighted the concept on on of their concept bucks. As you can see in the video below, it featured the flow of UI across different parts of the HMI and an AI companion that reacted to voice and followed commands from people inside the vehicle.

As part of the journey we introduced Changan to the concept of creating quick and dirty prototypes, that can be tested with people and iterated upon to create suitable interactions.

2. Mercedes Benz HMI Research center, Stuttgart (Germany)

Mercedes approached us for a very short engagement of a few weeks, where we could explore the concept of a minimal vehicle dashboard - being interacted upon by the mobile device as a primary mediator between driver & vehicle.

We built a number of interaction concepts for them, culminating with a functional experience prototype connecting phone and car in innovative ways. You can see a number of the designed micro-interactions in the video below.