Recently my colleagues and I have been very busy working on very interesting campaigns. One of them is the BMW campaign where I dedicate this post to. (Hopefully I'll be able soon to write more about our other projects. Some of them involves heavy papervision3D work!)

To launch BMW's new 3 Series car, we (DNBmedia) organized (in cooperation with marketing agency Ubachs Wisbrun/JWT) a so called "Interactive test drive". Test drivers of this new car and visitors of the website are 100% connected to each other by an streaming audio and video connection and GPS information will be "broadcasted" and shows up on a map. Visitors of the website can call directly with the test driver inside the car and ask him about his experiences.
Starting from September the 23th there are 2 cars fully equipped with our streaming and tracking system for a period of 2 weeks. They will be driving around at working days from 9 AM till 6 PM GMT+1, or 3 AM till 12 PM EDT . People who are interested in a test drive can sign up as well, but only 120 people can be selected for the interactive test drive during the campaign. When you are not selected, a local dealer will contact for a regular test drive.

During development of this campaign I've spend many hours on the highway. First of all to test UMTS connections of the Dutch mobile operators. KPN is definitely the winner, Vodafone is on a good second place and T-Mobile is way behind on the third place and was big trouble!
Once it was clear we had to use KPN, I've been working on the back seat of my car to get the GPS tracking up and running. ( I lost count how many times we drove around Amsterdam's A10 )
As soon as we've worked out GPS tracking we started to drive around with laptops, webcams and GPS modules to see if the system was stable enough and find the optimal streaming settings.

As a part of the campaign journalists need to have test drives with car and our system as well. These test drives where/will be broadcasted live on their websites, which will cause a huge amount of viewers. In order to stabilize the system more we decided to equip our cars redundant, so when one system fails, we can switch over to one of the other systems, using an other mobile operator. So far there have been 2 broadcasts on external site's, without any noticeable connection drops!

During this campaign we made use of the following resources:

• Umap by AF Components - Map component
• TheByteWorks PHP serial extension - Communication with bluetooth GPS device
• Streaming Media Partners Europe - Facilitation Wowza media communication server

Interested in the campaign? Have a look at the website: www.interactieveproefrit.nl.

Read more to view some pictures of the developed system, the car self and the widget.

Interesting links:

• Autweek test drive
• Telegraaf news article
  
• Routenet - Representation of GPS tracking information on their map.

Widget:

BMW 3 front:

Laptops:

Laptop close-up:

Interior:

Webcams:

GPS Module:

BMW 3 back:

BMW 3 side:

Tags: General //