Toyota Future Car Educational Website

March 13, 2009

Here's a fun and cute educational website from Toyota envisioning the future of car technology using amazing 3D graphics visualization. Toyota-Future.com/ is a fascinating educational approach on new car technology. Probably useful for teachers, or just to be entertained for a couple minutes with high-quality animation while picking up some tidbits about cars of the future. The site was developed mainly for Japanese users, but that doesn't mean the rest of us can't also enjoy its delightfully educational content!

Toyota Future is a simulated city with:

Future College - where you can learn about the future of mobility
Future on Your Street - where you help a professor and his assistant create the future.
Toyota TV - which shows movies about future technologies.
Tech library - where materials about R&D are displayed

My favorite part is the animation on the "Future on the Street". I actually spent 15 min moving my avatar around the streets trying to talk to the people on the street. Eventually I collected some info nugget for the professor and learned a new fact. I bet someone much younger would find this quite entertaining too.

Next, I looked up the Environmental Lecture -- which talks about the challenge for a lighter vehicle. "Why do we need to move 1ton of metal just to move 1 or 2 people?" The animation is amazing. It translates into visual term what 1ton means (number of bananas, anyone? smile)

Then, I watched some Toyota TV. This short ad is my favorite - it talks about how selflessness, and presence can translate to us being better citizens (and Toyota being a better corporate citizen).

The whole site is an educational endeavor that employs a visual learning approach. The graphics are well done although by no means perfect. At one point, I thought they were teaching about flying cars, but it turns out the animation could handle my car passing by a tall building and rendered it as being in front of the upper stories of the skyscraper. Very entertaining but be warned -- it requires quite a bit of computing power. My MacBook slowed down at several points -- especially in the lecture when the pop quiz came up.

The concepts presented are also pretty basic. They seem like good material for kids (maybe 8yrs+) to learn on their own though, not likely targeted at adults who don't have much time to spare. The TV part is a good place to pick up on some Toyota ads, especially if you are a Tivo user like me...

Marn-Yee Lee
Contributing Editor
AskPatty.com

Marn-Yee Lee is pursuing an MBA in Sustainability at the Presidio School of Management in San Francisco. After spending a decade in I.T. and on Wall Street, she is now pursuing her passion for the environment. She sees business as a partner for creating innovative solutions to pressing environmental issues. In her spare time, she writes a blog to inspire others to consider the impact of their daily lives on the environment at busythinking.blogspot.com and beingsustainable.blogspot.com.

Connect with AskPatty on:

YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/user/askpatty