BMW i Interaction Ease is a concept vehicle for the future of autonomous, on-demand mobility. It imagines a luxurious, human, and intuitive experience built without relying on screens and buttons. Smart materials and hidden sensors let the vehicle understand and respond to natural human interaction, centered around bringing BMW's Intelligent Personal Assistant to life as an ambient presence throughout the cabin.
I was the primary creative technologist on the project, part of the core team from initial concept through final fabrication. I worked closely with CMF, automotive, and interaction designers to iterate on experience concepts through rapid prototyping: mapping the passenger journey, testing computer-vision gesture control, and building the lighting and motion systems that gave the assistant its presence.
We mapped the full passenger journey, from approaching the vehicle to entering, riding, and exiting, to find every moment the vehicle could acknowledge, guide, or delight someone. Each interaction was designed to feel ambient and unobtrusive: present when needed, invisible when not.
My primary focus was bringing BMW's Intelligent Personal Assistant to life: a dynamic, ephemeral presence that felt intuitive and playful to interact with, built through a symbiosis of material, light, and animation. I experimented across technologies and materials to create an intelligence that could be everywhere, a presence that ultimately disappears, yet lives within every surface.
Every pattern started as a physical test before it was a spec. I tested computer-vision and gesture-control input inside a seating buck model, mocked up LED confirmation sequences, and iterated dash surface lighting directly against real materials rather than a screen simulation.
Prototyping moved constantly between digital simulation and hands-on fabrication: wiring under-dash lighting for gesture feedback, animating idle and active states on early seat fabric samples, and refining the physical build until the behavior held up in the model, not just on paper.
BMW i Interaction Ease was unveiled at CES 2020. It demonstrated a vision for how autonomous vehicles could develop a genuine personality and relationship with their passengers, not as a gadget, but as an intelligent companion designed around human presence.
