Digital agency Soap Creative has launched ‘Cars That Feel’ - an interactive installation with partner Toyota, at this year’s Vivid festival.
The installation transforms three Toyota Prius cars into sentient beings which respond emotionally to human interaction.
The cars sleep during the day but as the sun goes down one by one they come to life and begin interacting with passers by.
“Soap is a collection of people who love to play, make and do,” says Brad Eldridge, Soap Creative partner. “We’ve always been fans of Vivid and we’re stoked to be able to contribute a playful, interactive digital experience that brings something new to the festival.”
Developed as an internal innovation R&D project at Soap, each car has it’s own personality and connects with people through light projections, colour and sound.
The technology powering the cars was developed by Soap’s in-house development team over the past four months. Each car uses six internal BenQ projectors, Arduino controllers and high intensity LED light rigs. A custom application was build to control the internal projection mapping, lighting, sound and animation.
The ‘Cars That Feel’ idea was a coincidental fit with Toyota and their global patent on the concept of cars that show feelings. Upon seeing Soap’s Vivid concept, Toyota welcomed the opportunity to be involved.
"Each of the interactive Prius hybrids at Vivid will allow festival patrons to explore a possible future relationship between people and cars - a future that embodies Toyota's 'fun to drive' philosophy," a Toyota spokesman said.
Soap partnered with Bruce Heald and the team at Noise International for sound design and music.
‘Cars That Feel’ can be seen directly under the south end of the Harbour Bridge from May 23rd to the 9th of June.
Festival goers are encouraged to capture and share their images with the hashtag #carsthatfeel.
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