The simulation challenge
The project's aim to fully and as accurately as possible reproduce the user experience of the in-vehicle system in a web browser poses challenges on several levels: conceptual, technical and organisational.
Conception
A large proportion of the usage scenarios that take place in the real car and are reflected in the infotainment system are generated by influences that take place off-screen: the car navigates from A to B, gets plugged into the charging station, receives radio, forwards calls to the hands-free system, is involved in an accident.
Since the simulator has to represent all these states, we develop specific simulation scenarios for each of these events.
Technical implementation
The functionality of the infotainment system in a modern car is extremely extensive. Hundreds of individual screens, a design system with several hundred UI components, real-time 3D renderings.
The texts displayed in the system alone consist of more than 30,000 text strings in 37 languages.
To cope with this complexity, we design and develop an ecosystem of tools around the simulator itself to help us process the various data sources for use in the simulator in the shortest possible time.
Organisation
Developing the simulator runs parallel to developing the actual vehicle infotainment system. This requires close collaboration with various teams within the company, as well as a flexible and responsive methodology to react to changes in information and specifications.
Operation
We operate the ever-growing family of different simulator versions for different car models and software versions on different platforms adapted to each use case.
