The Immersive Bus: Toyota Boshoku's MOOX at LEAP East

For us at ConnectAR, one of the highlights of LEAP East in Hong Kong this month was Toyota Boshoku's presentation of MOOX, its interactive cinema bus. MOOX — a coined word combining "Mobile" and "Box" — has evolved from a CES concept, to an autonomous driving vehicle, and further into MOOX-RIDE, a content-experience system that can be fitted into a bus! They turned the windows into screens, layering AR content over the real view, while spatial audio, synchronized seat vibration, mist and scent complete the immersion. It's a mobile immersive theatre!

Content can be made to respond to the vehicle's live location and to passengers' gestures. It is a genuinely impressive piece of engineering, and seeing it presented on the LEAP East stage was another great reminder that we have got a great many international events, and it was especially interesting for practitioners like us who are in the AR/VR/Immersive space.

【 IMAGE GALLERY: photos from the LEAP East talk / MOOX bus 】

What excites us most is the potential beyond entertainment — education. Imagine a school bus becoming a moving classroom: a heritage tour where the window annotates the city views, or a science trail that unfolds as the city passes by. As a Hong Kong AR company, StoryTellAR Go already builds location-anchored interactive content — our DIY-AR Treasure Hunt uses the spatial data from the Government's CSDI portal. And leveraging our past experience in building the tech in experience centres and museums, we would love to have the opportunity to create digital experiences on "mobile" (moving, not smartphone) platforms like MOOX-RIDE.

For schools and organizations not yet ready to invest in dedicated hardware, our smartphone-based AR solutions can deliver location-triggered adventures on the phones that are already in everyone's pocket. But for NGOs, organizations, and school-sponsoring bodies that can work out the budgeting side, MOOX-RIDE shows a lot of possibilities for our immersive future, and we can't wait to see what comes next!