Car interfaces keep gaining features,

Car interfaces keep gaining features, but experience gets lost in complexity. With River, we stripped that back: only surface what the driver needs, when they need it.

We wanted the HMI to belong to the car, not sit on top. So we designed both as one system: car, interior, cluster, main display, app.

Rive was key to bringing the whole system to life. We used joysticks and blend states to animate the cluster gauges, solos to play back a pre-rendered Blender navigation scene on the central display, and state machine inputs to bring the whole prototype to life.

We then built a companion app and plugged it into a manufacturer's API to test against real vehicle data. The app works like a key: gives you access and gets out of the way. Just the right function at the right moment.

One ecosystem where every screen earns its place.