Cupra Sonic Vroom

What's the craziest instrument you have ever played? Is it something as crazy as the exterior of a car? CUPRA Sonic VRoom lets you turn one of their cars into an interactive symphony in mixed reality!

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Cupra Sonic Vroom

Team members:

Dylan Leavitt-Phibbs

Filip Georgiev

Johannes Tscharn

Martina Krastev

Thomas Bruhn

Introduction

Our task was to create an interesting XR experience for the car manufacturer CUPRA. After much deliberation, we came up with Sonic Vroom - an immersive audio-reactive experience, using Mixed Reality to transform into an intuitive digital audio workstation (DAW). The user can build a house song by using the car as a musical instrument.

Inspiration

As a young brand, CUPRA carves out its unique identity by collaborating with music creators forging a strong community. This resonated with the team and we wanted to create an experience that aligns their products even further with their brand identity.

How we did it

The process began with much deliberation. We went through a lot of ideas, of which two sounded like the proper path forward. However, after discussing these ideas with CUPRA representatives and experiencing their current, well-polished, XR application, we realized we had to think outside of the box. To this end, we visited the CUPRA showroom and talked with another representative there who helped us understand the brand identity more. It was there, where the idea behind Sonic Vroom was born. We found out that music is a big part of CUPRA's identity and that they were sponsors of different musical events. This meant that sound would have to be a big part of our experience. Still, we hadn't really found exactly what we would be working on. Some arguments arose about what our goal should be, but after a bout of stress and many walks outside, we finally agreed to stick with what would later become Sonic Vroom.

From there, we used Shapes XR to visualize what we would like our whole experience to be. Since we were aware that the time limit would not allow us to create the whole experience, we decided to use Shapes XR as the mock-up space for the whole idea, while we would use Unity to create a MVP that has the most exciting parts of the experience working and ready to demo.

The experience was simple - allow CUPRA customers to create their own music that they can share with like-minded individuals in the CUPRA tribe. Our funny little twist was that we would not use an instrument, but CUPRA's cars themselves. By tapping on different parts of the car, the user could add different looped sounds that when combined created a unique track, similar to how it is done with beat makers in the music industry.

For our MVP, we managed to secure a house track from a musician who was also a CUPRA brand ambassador. We then split this track into its different frequency bands, i.e., into its components - the bass, the vocals, the drums, the synths, the kicks, and the fx. Touching different car components would trigger one of these music components on and off, essentially being able to create the full piece by exploring the car. To make the experience more visual appealing, we also made these specific components glow and emit particles. What completed the experience was that both the particles and the glowing components would be affected by the music, i.e., the components would flash in unison with one of the music frequencies, essentially making a musical visualizer. The particles's emission speed was also affected by this.

To achieve this, we used a fast fourier transform to find only the necessary frequencies and then to use the output from the transform as a direct input to either a shader or the particle system. The inspiration was taken from this repository. We also used Meta's Interaction SDK to make the user's MR experience seamless.

We used a CUPRA car asset provided by them in our visualization. This way, we could overlay the MR experience on top of a real car, so that we can get a fully immersive experience, where touching the real car would result in changes in the MR environment.

The challenge

The design challenge was to create a simple, but seamless audio feedback in MR that compliments well with non-intrusive visuals. We had to play around with a lot of different ideas before we could reach our final solution. Implementation-wise, creating good shader effects, that could be manipulated by sound was particularly daunting. Furthermore, ensuring that the digital twin of the car could be correctly placed over the real car was not particularly straightforward.

What we're proud of

We are most proud of creating an innovative experience which incorporates music and gets people excited. Everybody who tried our prototype, whether when overlaid on an actual car or not, found it really cool and were engaged to play around with the experience. Furthermore, we are proud of our collaboration since the challenges that arose from our diverse professional backgrounds really forced us to find a way to speak the same language and be more understanding towards each other.

What's next?

In the future, Sonic Vroom can be improved with new interactive zones on the CUPRA, new CUPRA models, more diverse music choices, more VFX and mimicking a proper beat maker. The ultimate goal would be to explore the whole car, and all the cars.

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