Cupra's Creative Capybaras

MIRO board project development process

Inspiration

Cupra's showroom and sleek and bold branding.

What it does

It is a 'choose your own journey' experience where the user can explore the cars features based on their personality. They choose on of three tracks: city trip, racer and adventurer. The user chooses their journey by physically interacting with the car doors and the experience will highlights a few useful features as well as optional accessories that fit the chosen path, in a 'show don't tell' fashion. The other places will then also tailor their content to the user. In the end, the environment will change to a relevant backdrop, to show the user how it would fit.

How we built it

Our application has been created by extensively brainstorming, both physically and online. We spent the first 1.5 days of the project purely on this ideation, as we wanted to create something special and not too obvious. This proved challenging in the given context, but that is also the reason we picked this path. We did research on the customer journey by visiting the showroom, scouring the website and other social media, creating personas, conducting interviews and practicing a variety of brainstorming techniques. We also used LIDAR scans of the showroom and the cars in combination with ShapesXR to test the brainstormed ideas in an early stage. ShapesXR allowed for rapid prototyping, but as the project became more complex, we switched to Unity. We created a digital twin of the car that we then mapped on top of each other and used technologies such as pass-through and hand tracking to elevate the experience. Creating a digital twin meant we could also try out the application without needing a physical car.

Challenges we ran into

We chose this track because of the challenge it provided, but it proved harder than expected. We were not entirely happy with our initial idea and therefore took longer to actually start working. This meant that technological blockers had a larger impact on the time schedule and that not all features envisioned were able to be realised. The biggest one being occlusion of the everything surrounding the car, so that the car could be placed seamlessly in a another environment.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are quite proud of the delivered product, especially as we were only a team of three and not super experienced in the realm of AR. This includes the video, which is very sleek in our opinion :). We are also proud of the embodied experience that we deliver, to hopefully seamlessly integrated the real and virtual. Lastly we are very happy with the dynamic, the communication and work distribution within the team. We had fun, but also deeply interesting discussions which will surely help us grow as developers/designers.

What we learned

Besides having increased our skill in various areas, we have learned that we should spent a bit less time ideating and already start with the hardest technical aspects when you know they will be needed regardless, so there is enough time for debugging/set backs. Sometimes forcing ideation does not foster the best ideas and working on something else in parallel can improve both aspects.