Goals
During my tenure at Volkswagen Group Future Center Europe, I was deeply involved in development of a seating buck for rapid automotive concept prototyping and validation enviourment. This environment served as a cost-effective alternative to traditional testing within physical test vehicles, enabling designers and researchers to quickly iterate on UX concepts, automous driving, user interface layouts, overall passenger experience concepts amount others.
The system utilised a physical seating buck equipped with sensors and connected to virtual world where a digital twin of the car exist, with enchanced capabilities for some of the functionality. My role centered around building and supporting the virtual world with design and development. Yet, my knowadge in hardware and system design was utilised for all parts of the seating buck, such as hardware improvements, sensors and overall experience. I was leveraging technologies such as Unity3D for real-time rendering and simulation, MQTT for data communicaton between physical and virtual world, and bridging sensor data from RaspberyPI to MQTT server.
A significant component of this project involved establishing a robust and repeatable prototyping process that significantly reduced development time and costs compared to traditional methods. This environment enabled Volkswagen brands' teams to rapidly test and refine UX experience, user interface layouts, and overall passenger experiences before committing resources to physical vehicle integration. My proficiency in Unity 3D, coupled with my experience in MQTT integration and sensor data processing, proved invaluable in creating this flexible and efficient prototyping platform.
The projects presented here are based on my experiences at Volkswagen Group Future Center Europe. Due to confidentiality agreements, certain details have been omitted or generalized.