NitroHeads - Driving Car Sharing to the Next Level

Take Users, Passenger and Owners into the Loop of Car Sharing to Improve Ecology, Safety and Social Sharing

Comment

NitroHeads - Driving Car Sharing to the next Level!

The main goal of NitroHeads is to encourage the passengers and drivers of shared cars to do their job more responsibly. Resulting in benefits for Society, Ecology and Safety. The whole project is built on a platform that enables drivers, passengers, owners and car manufacturer to interact in the easiest possible way.

Driver Interaction

The interaction with the driver of a car is happens exclusively via the built in head-up display as it is built into all modern cars. This ensures safety by not taking the driver's attention from the actual driving tasks. The various feedbacks that can be displayed to the user such as, tips for ecological driving, gamification achievements for responsible driving and picking up people to fill up the car. On the other hand gamification penalties for not respecting speed limits for example are shown as well.

These achievements can be used in any game connected to the platform played by the driver. NitroHeads acts as a perfect example of such a game since it's a simple, free and addictive and ties in thematically with carsharing by embodying the exact opposite values of the platform. The most important interaction by a driver is after they get out of the car, when they can see how their drive went and use any bonuses they have gained.

Passenger Interaction

Passengers and all the other people that are not actually driving the car can play the game independently and challenge each other. They can use the achievements they collected by driving or being a passenger of a responsible driver.

Social Benefits

NitroHeads is a social game in two distinct, complementary ways. Firstly, it encourages people to share their car rides with other, like-minded people. Secondly, it allows them to repeatedly compete against friends and people they may have met during carsharing, potentially fostering a sense of community among carsharers in certain areas.

Ecological Benefits

The potential ecological benefits of this project are many. People are encouraged to carshare, which is more environmentally friendly than the alternative of everyone having their own car. This would of course be true for every service that drives more people to carsharing; NitroHeads offers additional benefits by specifically encouraging people to drive more ecologically by offering bonuses for not accelerating and braking too hard, taking efficient routes, sharing cars with multiple people and choosing a car with a low carbon footprint.

Business Cases

The main purpose of NitroHeads is to drive more people to a car sharing service owned by Volvo. It achieves this not only by making the process of carsharing more fun, but also by providing an additional entry point into the platform. The game would be freely available and could be played without taking part in carsharing; the carsharing simply allows the users to progress in the game more quickly. It can be likened to the Pay to Win model, minus all the negative connotations. Share to win, so to say...

Since Volvo controls the platform, they could offer users additional bonuses to players using a Volvo. This would lead to more Volvos being used and consequently, sold. Moreover we can imagine to put some ads and it would be possible to sell bonuses inside the app.

The Story Behind

We are four students from Zurich, Basel and Mons (Belgium) that didn't know each other before and showed up at the StartHack in St. Gallen with different backgrounds. From Software Engineering, Coding, Business and Mechanics to Math. We collected our ideas on the Volvo challenge to create something that could benefit society, the environment as well as Volvo's bottom line. After 36 hours of brainstorming, developing ideas and coding an Android app we came up with a fully working game that looks nice, is fun to play and drives care sharing to the next level.

Built With

Share this project:

Updates