Tim Knapen Work Contact
Renault Mégane Real Views x
Renault Mégane Real Views, 2015

For the launch of the new Renault Mégane, Publicis Brussels asked me to work with them on an ambitious plan. Instead of counting views on a YouTube ad, they wanted to record and broadcast the amount of views the new Mégane would get in the real world.

To achieve this, we equipped the car with 6 cameras and developed custom software that could detect people looking at the car in real-time. The photos of people's detected reactions were uploaded automatically to a website that tracked the amount of "real views" the new car got on the streets in Belgium. In the back window of the car, we mounted a big LED display that always showed the current amount of views from passers-by.

Our system also tracked the GPS location of the car and displayed it live on the website so that car enthusiasts could hunt down the new Mégane and get a glimpse of it in the real world.

www.realviews.be

Technical Details:
Software built in C++ with Open Frameworks.
Face detection built with DLib machine learning library.
GPS tracking and driver for LED Display running on Arduino.
Web development by Everything is Fun

CONTEXT

1. DLib face tracking

Dlib is a modern open source C++ toolkit containing machine learning algorithms and tools for creating complex software in C++ to solve real world problems. It is used in both industry and academia in a wide range of domains including robotics, embedded devices, mobile phones, and large high performance computing environments.

dlib on github.