Unity and TomTom: From game design to location tech, powering the next generation of maps 

Game development, automotive and mapmaking are more closely linked than many would realize. Thanks to the democratization of key development tools and a big dose of open collaboration, the three are further intertwining to bring the richest, most visually stunning maps to the world’s newest and most exciting vehicles.

The worlds of automotive and video games have long flirted. Designs from the automotive industry take center stage in some of the world’s most popular driving games. Inversely, carmakers look to game designers to help elevate their in-vehicle design, dashboard and display graphics.

One of the most well-known cases being the Nissan GT-R, where the carmaker contracted Polyphony Digital, the company behind the Gran Turismo franchise, to use its skills in graphics, rendering and design to create part of the GT-R’s infotainment display.

As cars become ever more advanced, and drivers demand ever richer, more immersive and novel in-car experiences, these kinds of partnerships are becoming even more common and important.

Earlier this year, TomTom struck up a relationship with Unity in pursuit of bringing the best graphics and visualizations to its maps and digital cockpit platform.

Unity made its name developing video game engines and development environments. The company’s mission was to democratize game development by making it affordable and accessible to the masses. By doing so, Unity struck a seam of innovation and creativity in the world that had been untapped because game development traditionally required large teams, complex enterprise solutions and triple-A budgets. With the Unity engine, anyone can let their imagination run wild and make their own game — and that’s why we have insanely popular games like Pokémon Go.

But something else happened. Other industries started using Unity to bring graphical visualizations to life. Industries like film, structural engineering, media, automotive and now mapmaking, are all now using Unity to create products, simulations and digital twins.

With such scope and power, choosing Unity as the development tool for its maps and digital cockpit was a simple choice for TomTom.

Unity and TomTom: Developing visually stunning maps faster than ever

According to Rok Erjavec, TomTom’s VP of Engineering for Visualization, working with Unity brings several positives.

To begin with, like TomTom, Unity is no stranger to the car. Blending Unity’s understanding of graphics, HMI visuals and their development with TomTom’s understanding of the driver, driving and in-vehicle demands makes for a powerful combination.

In an interview with Unity, Erjavec highlighted the valuable knowledge base and experts at Unity that help TomTom developers get the most out of the platform. “It [the collaboration] opens new channels for innovation because, for us, we are a real-time product,” he said. And being able to develop and iterate in real time, with real time support, is a must.

Indeed, there’s a lot more to working with Unity than just its capabilities in visual design. Services like its Integrated Success program ensure TomTom’s team become Unity experts themselves. It’s not just a case of working with Unity tools but working with Unity’s people.

“The Industry Success program has been helpful in upskilling our development teams who are new to Unity,” Erjavec says. “Beyond that, we also have a group of dedicated developers from Unity that work directly with our team, and that is another accelerant to how quickly we adopt the tools, how we become more proficient with it and therefore build more sophisticated products.”

It seems Unity’s original goal of democratizing game design has had a vast impact beyond its original intention — taking map design to new levels through more agile, open and real-time development.

“It’s completely changed how we’re able to evolve the product, at a much faster pace and we have much tighter collaboration between different disciplines. UX/UI now collaborate very closely with development,” Erjavec said.

Those benefits aren’t exclusive to the relationship between TomTom and Unity though. They are also core to the mapping experience for TomTom's other partners and customers, who build with the company’s maps.

“As our [visualization] SDK is now seamlessly integrated with Unity, developers can access code and plugins that function within the Unity environment. Designers can customize the look of their [TomTom-based] maps in Unity too, without needing an engineer to build specific use cases and applications.”

A catalyst for innovation

Working with Unity and learning from game design is unlocking a host of new possibilities for TomTom’s map visualizations and how they appear in the digital cockpit.

As Erjavec stresses, “There’s a lot that can be borrowed from what games have done, to build something that’s more representative of the real world. Such as, how you visualize complex geographical scenarios with maps that have not traditionally been three-dimensional.”

For example, highway stacking, where roads and junctions run beneath and atop of each other, can be accurately visualized in detail to show drivers exactly what road they should be on in terms of their movement through space in three dimensions.

With TomTom and Unity complex junctions where roads are "stacked" on top of each other can be visualized clearly.

We’re no longer bound by some of the technical limitations we once had. Ultra-high-definition displays, powerful processors, ample storage and wide coverage, high-speed connectivity mean that a map today can be nearly anything and everything we want it to be, up to being a photo-realistic representation of the world.

We live in a dynamic, three-dimensional world, and if our maps are to get ever more useful, they should be dynamic and three-dimensional too. With TomTom and Unity, the limitation now, is our imagination.