Validating
luxury UX
without a physical car.
High-fidelity VR simulators for the Aston Martin Lagonda digital cockpit. Multiplayer co-location over Photon Fusion, live eye-tracking heatmaps captured on HP Reverb and Varjo hardware, and tooling built for distributed design reviews across the UK and Europe.
- Role
- Product Design Engineer
- Timeline
- Nov 2024 - Dec 2025
- Client
- SIMUX Defence
- Platform
- HP Reverb · Varjo · PC VR
- Core stack
- Unity HDRP · HLSL · CAN Bus · Photon Fusion
- Rendering
- Photoreal leather, carbon fiber, glass
A virtual car that behaves like a real one.
Designing HMI for luxury vehicles normally requires expensive physical bucks and slow iteration cycles. Aston Martin needed a way to validate digital-cockpit concepts and ergonomics for the Lagonda rapidly, with teams distributed across the UK and Europe.
The challenge was to build a photorealistic VR prototype that allowed multiple engineers to sit in the same virtual car, interact with the dashboard, and analyze driver attention - all in real time, all synchronized.
The system became a design tool: menu hierarchies were validated, interaction flows refined, and UI state machines tested - before a single line of production vehicle code was written.
From Figma to VR.
Designing dashboard interfaces and interaction flows in Figma - the ground truth for production.
Importing CAD models, setting up the VR interaction rig, and porting Figma specs into runtime UI.
Implementing Photon Fusion for state synchronization and Photon Voice for in-cabin chat.
Integrating eye-tracking on HP Reverb and Varjo headsets to capture gaze data and surface it as live heatmaps.
Conducting multi-user design reviews and heatmap analysis to feed the next iteration.
Under the hood.
Multiplayer collaboration
Built on Photon Fusion: designers and engineers inhabit the same virtual vehicle, point at features, and discuss HMI changes in real time regardless of physical location.
Eye-tracking analytics
Hardware eye-tracking on HP Reverb and Varjo visualizes where drivers look during specific tasks. Heatmaps and time-to-fixation metrics validate attention patterns, information hierarchy and interaction flows.
CAN Bus Integration
Real-time vehicle telemetry integrated via CAN Bus protocols. A fully functional virtual dashboard where physical inputs and telemetry trigger real UI states, rendered through custom HLSL shader effects and visual feedback systems on the instrument cluster displays.
Photorealistic rendering
Unity HDRP driving high-fidelity materials for leather, carbon fiber and glass - the virtual prototype had to match the luxury aesthetic of the final product.