As part of a revamp of the ‘Living & Working Together’ area at Eureka! in Halifax, AY-PE developed two car-themed interactives, both of which launched in February 2023.

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The 'Sat Nav Driving Game' was designed and developed for visitors aged five and older. Using a touch screen and a physical steering wheel, visitors are challenged to follow the sat nav map and instructions in order to drive a car across town, and reach the destination before time runs out. Visitors only need to control the car's steering with the wheel, their speed is handled automatically. The car is prevented from leaving the road; if it hits a curb it will rebound and move backwards a little, before being allowed to drive forward again. In addition to the sat nav map and route shown on the touch screen, direction arrows are shown on the large 4K road view screen, and spoken instructions such as turn left, turn right or turn around are given when needed.

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Visitors can choose to take their own route across the Halifax-themed town, the sat nav will recalculate the route to the destination automatically. The sat nav uses an enhanced A* pathfinding algorithm. If a left or right junction is missed, a regular A* algorithm would find the shortest path to the destination, which would likely be to turn around immediately to the missed junction. This isn’t always practical or realistic when driving a vehicle, so I enhanced the algorithm to look ahead along the road in the direction the car is moving, to see if there is a suitable junction that could be taken in order to reach the destination. If no suitable junction can be found within a reasonable distance, the algorithm will suggest the car be turned around.

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The gaming wheel used to steer the car is interfaced with via Phidgets hardware.

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I was responsible for concepting, designing and developing the interactive from a very open brief. It actually started life back in early 2020, just before the COVID-19 pandemic. AY-PE pitched for this project and as part of that pitch I developed a rapid prototype of a simple town that could be driven around using a joypad. The prototype was presented to Eureka! during the interview stage, but the pandemic arrived before Eureka! had awarded the project and it was put on hold for almost two years.

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The prototype concept that I devised used a snap-to-grid system (using ProGrids), and 10m x 10m prefabs for different sections of road and ground that could each be quickly assembled into different layouts. Each prefab used colliders to denote the edges of the road. Using an Xbox controller with Unity’s Input System made it quick and simple to get analogue steering working, and this could easily be adapted later to use a steering wheel. I built the town using ProBuilder, made the road textures in Photoshop and grabbed a few free assets (such as trees, lamp posts), from the Unity Asset Store.

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The final look and feel of the interactive is very different from the boxed-out prototype, as the client had a specific artistic style in mind throughout the entire exhibition. The client was really impressed with the prototype concept that we produced ahead of the interview with them.

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In addition to developing the software, I also performed the on-site installation and testing.

Credits

Simon Kendrew: Concept, prototype, software development, 3D scene creation, installation photos.

AY-PE: UI design

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Developed while employed as Senior Software Developer at AY-PE.