Toyota Social

Inspiration

Social media is immensely popular, as it provides unprecedented levels of communication between friends and loved ones. Toyota Socialv1.0 is intended to bring digital social experiences to a mobility platform.

What it does

Toyota Socialv1.0 allows users to see when their friends are driving, share current drive information, sync music listening in real time, and quickly place phone calls.

How we built it

Our application implements the Smartcar, Spotify, and Android Auto APIs to make these features a reality. Smartcar utilizes vehicle mobile apps such as Toyota Connect to obtain vehicle information like location for expanding our social app. With the Spotify API, we pull user tracks and track progress to sync requesting users' music with their friends. Android Auto brings all the technology together, being connected to user smart phones.

Challenges we ran into

Each of the 3 API components had unique challenges, requiring lots of documentation investigation to learn about the proper ways we could design our ideas. Smartcar provides simulation software to test vehicle software behavior, however it lacks many features and functionality that would've been necessary for us to make our application for applicable to a real environment. The Spotify API lacks a way to use their existing Group Session feature for music sharing, so we had to manually develop the feature. Alongside learning Android app development with Android Auto, the unique challenge of user interface design took adaptability and creativity.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We're immensely proud of the technology that we were able to develop. Though we are in a prototype phase, we found ways to demonstrate a real implementation of our idea in a very short amount of time, which gives us promise for future development efforts.