Infiniti
“Driver’s Seat VR”
Roles
Genres
Challenge
INFINITI wanted to introduce its Q60 and QX30 concept vehicles at Pebble Beach through an experience that could communicate more than traditional automotive media. With an opportunity to explore emerging virtual reality technology, the challenge became defining products that could place audiences inside the performance, design, and craftsmanship of vehicles they could not simply take for a conventional test drive.
From the initial INFINITI stakeholder conversations, I was part of the team determining what those products should become. Rather than treating VR as a technology demonstration, we developed two complementary experiences around distinct aspects of the brand: the emotion of driving and the craft of automotive design.
Product Strategy & Delivery
I helped shape the product concepts and owned product and technical strategy, vendor coordination, delivery, testing, and launch readiness. The work required coordinating developers, VR engineers, hardware engineers, UX and design, 3D artists, producers, and QA while maintaining alignment between creative ambition, physical hardware, immersive software, content production, and the realities of delivering a dependable public experience.
I interfaced with the live-action production team throughout its work while that team retained ownership of the international shoot. My focus was ensuring that the resulting content, VR applications, physical simulator, and supporting technologies ultimately came together as cohesive products. As the experiences moved toward launch, I led product testing and helped drive synchronization between the VR experience and physical hardware so what audiences saw, heard, and physically felt worked as a unified experience.
Two Experiences, One Product Ecosystem
Dream Road put audiences behind the wheel of the Q60 Concept and connected spectacular driving environments from Norway, Italy, and Morocco into an impossible continuous journey. Live-action footage and CGI created the visual world, while the flagship event installation paired Oculus Rift VR with a custom driving simulator incorporating physical movement and feedback. The objective was not simply to watch a drive, but to create the sensation of participating in one.
From Pencil to Metal approached the automobile from an entirely different perspective. Built around the QX30 Concept and INFINITI Executive Design Director Alfonso Albaisa, the experience placed users inside the vehicle’s creative evolution—from initial sketches and CAD development through clay modeling and ultimately the completed concept vehicle. Rather than explaining the design process from the outside, the product allowed that process to unfold around the viewer in immersive three-dimensional space.
Together, the experiences extended beyond the physical installation into a broader digital product ecosystem. Driver’s Seat was delivered through mobile experiences for iOS and Android with Google Cardboard support, while the richer Oculus experience powered the event installation. The immersive content also extended into YouTube 360, allowing audiences beyond Pebble Beach to explore the work through an emerging interactive video format.
Physical + Digital Integration
The flagship Driver’s Seat installation added another layer of product complexity: software, immersive content, and physical hardware all had to behave as one system in front of a live audience. The custom seat and simulator incorporated physical feedback and movement synchronized with the VR driving experience, creating a direct relationship between what the participant saw and what they felt.
I helped oversee that integration and led testing ahead of the event, working across software and hardware disciplines to identify issues that would be difficult to discover when evaluating either component independently. Launch readiness meant evaluating the experience as an actual user would encounter it—from entering the activation and being fitted into the experience through application performance, VR playback, physical synchronization, and completion of the ride.
Launch & Impact
Driver’s Seat debuted during the 2015 Pebble Beach Automotive Week and Pebble Beach Concours d’Elegance, turning the introduction of INFINITI’s concept vehicles into an immersive product experience rather than a conventional display. The launch combined a public VR installation with mobile distribution and 360-degree digital content, allowing the same product idea to operate across an event environment, personal devices, and emerging media platforms.
The work also arrived at an important moment in the evolution of consumer VR. Dream Road and From Pencil to Metal became centerpieces of what was reported as the first automotive campaign to use YouTube’s newly introduced 360-degree advertising format, while the Driver’s Seat mobile experience extended the products to iOS, Android, and Google Cardboard. This multi-platform approach allowed an experience designed around a physical event to reach audiences well beyond Pebble Beach.
Recognition
The recognition reflected the larger achievement of the product: bringing brand strategy, storytelling, live action, 3D design, VR software, mobile technology, physical hardware, and experiential delivery together as one coherent experience. For me, the project demonstrated how product leadership can bridge creative ambition and technical execution—helping define what should be built, aligning specialized teams around that vision, testing the complete experience, and carrying it through to a high-profile public launch.