Holden Cruze: you can tell it where to go
We were asked to demonstrate a product innovation, in an innovative way.
Our client GM-Holden was launching the Holden Cruze: a new model featured a new voice-controlled UI, including Google Maps integration.
We created an online test drive of the technology, in the form of a highly interactive web ad that invited you to speak the name of a destination — and be taken on a virtual test-drive to that place, without leaving your laptop.
A genuinely enjoyable demonstration of the tech, and the car (and our skill!)
Just like the new Cruze, this experience featured a ton of engineering under the hood, a slick interface, and some powerful safety features:
We leveraged the beta version of the HTML5 Google Voice SDK — tuned to the Kiwi accent
We built a web scraper that captured street view sequences of your journey in the background as PNGs, and stitched them into video, on the fly
And we built ten different safety fallback versions for browser and OS compatibility — can’t have a car technology demo causing your laptop to crash, now, can we?!
And of course, we invited users to experience the tech for real, by adding a book-a-test-drive form field to the unit.