Appstem debuts breakthrough VR app for Byton Concept Car
BYTON VR App for at CES Asia 2018 | K-Byte Concept for autonomous driving electric cars
Steve Jobs believed the revolution of user interface would change everything — and the iphone UI completely changed everything. Now, Byton wants to re-interpret this strategy to create the most future-facing UI for the auto industry.
Appstem helped the company realize the first stage of it’s UI dream by creating a completely unique VR app to showcase the Byton VR Experience, at CES Asia in June.
The Appstem team pulled out all the stops to create an Oculus VR experience app for the Byton CES Asia booth in roughly a week. Sitting in “pods” attendees used the app to view 360 video of the inside of the Byton car of the future. The VR app provided a full touring experience on the show floor using 6 Oculus Go devices showcasing 7 different scenarios of what the car could do in different scenic locations. Appstem worked in lockstep, on a very tight deadline, with Byton’s video production group, Continuous Production.
Working with a 15-hour time difference and often into the early hours, Appstem’s engineers had many challenges in creating a truly immersive 3D video experience of cool locations around the world. The demo had to be very simple to use: hit play, rewind and be ready to play again. Text is always difficult to do well in a VR application as your eyes are trying to focus. Additional challenges were adding different language titles and subtitles, for German, Mandarin, etc., all within a 3D environment. Unity was used to load the video and overlay the captions so that as you looked around the car the subtitles would follow you. It was painstakingly tricky, as frame drops in VR are unacceptable, even for half-a-second. Timing had to be exact, for example: at 1:20 seconds, pop up this translation. It was important to work with a trusted partner to ensure a grounded experience without feelings of sea sickness. Appstem was able to bring a completely integrated team with mobile expertise, VR expertise and UX to provide the translation overlays and branding assets and ensure it was all loaded onto the Oculus Go the simplest way.
Billed as more smartphone than car, the Byton Concept car was introduced earlier this year at CES. The concept is an all-electric vehicle that’s all about making use of the time spent en route. The emphasis is on quality; rather than 30 or 50 apps, they prefer to focus on 3 to 5 outstanding apps. Unlike cars that mostly focus on the driver, in a Byton car all seats are considered equally important with their own touch screen displays. The UI focuses on simplicity around user preferences, including voice or touch.
Byton closed a $500 million series B round to speed development of it’s smart connected vehicles just a few days before CES Asia. While still in concept mode, Byton claims it’s first car will be available in 2019 in China and 2020 in the U.S., with a starting price of $45,000. The company plans to build 25-30 branded stores in China next year.
