A peek inside the world of Mercedes-Benz R&D's new HQ in Sunnyvale, CA. Fun design details, 114 Nest thermostats, Nook clocks in 3D printed frames, and a peek at where they are going with Pebble, Google Glass, and more.
November 19th, 2013
Since 1994, MBRDNA was based in Palo Alto. Today was the grand opening of Mercedes-Benz Research & Development North America in Sunnyvale. The building is gold LEED certified and designed by Interior Architects. This R&D facility is where they work on telematics & user interaction, advanced user experience design, global Mercedes-Benz apps development, connectivity: consumer electronics & smartphone integration, autonomous driving, and user interface/HMI software development.
For the grand opening, I toured the facilities, and experienced many talks and demos of what they are working on! Take a peek into their world below...
The dramatic new MBRDNA ~ Mercedes-Benz Research & Development North America in Sunnyvale.
The "digital ribbon cutting" had the heads of Mercedes Benz design and research center as well as the mayor of Sunnyvale push a large button to start the Mercedes-Benz star spinning. Of all of the Mercedes-Benz building stars, this is the first one to be on the ground.
Instagram pics of the star in daylight and illuminated at night - and i couldn't resist pushing the giant button!
Research vehicle parking!!!
They definitely had fun with naming! Here's the Diamond Grille Cafeteria.
They crowd sourced the naming for conference rooms - letting the employees submit ideas and vote to name them, which are named after highways, with a different theme for each colored floor.
Here's one of their juice bars ~ stocked with fruit and magic bullets to make your own smoothies, they also have LOTS of Odwalla Smoothies throughout. There are also ice cream and coffee spots.
Peek at another coffee station and wall art...
One of the coffee bars has special Mercedes-Benz mugs which were a frosted matte on the outside.
Heading in to the 3D print room there's a huge 3D Systems sPro Laser Sintering SLS...
Throughout the conference (and a few other) rooms, you'll find Nooks in 3D printed frames as clocks. The hope is that the engineers can have fun with them and in the future program them to broadcast and display more (announce birthdays, etc!)...
Dashboard testing station...
Believe it or not ~ there's a garage door hidden in plain sight... the right angled pipe on the left is the opener!
Here's how it opens up!
As far as getting a peek at what they are up to inside ~ we got demos of Pebble apps, where the Pebble can vibrate to give you alerts while driving, pause your music, and talk to siri while in the car ~ and give you car data when you're outside of the car!
Tried out google glass where you can pick a location and have it start navigating you to walk there, hop in the car and it will transfer your destination to the car to help you drive there, and when you hop back out of the car it will continue directing you right to the door. Door to door navigation regardless of whether you are walking and/or driving!
See the car across the way with the hazards on and hood popped? Well so does the car we're in, and as soon as the hazards went on and the hood popped, it appeared as a warning on our map.
Imagine interacting with all of your car's data in beautiful infographics on a responsive website... they likened it to how people interact with Nike's fuel points to track their movements...
For the passengers to be more autonomous (and not bother the driver), apps that allow them to control the backseat screens, seat warmers/massagers, and even browse the internet... while the app allows you to have a digital dial like the front seat console, for typing you can have an actual keyboard instead of scrolling to each letter.
We were teased with this Nest Thermostat integration where your nest will know when you're close to home or leaving... and automatically adjust the temperature. Apparently there will be BIG announcements coming from Nest and Mercedes-Benz at CES 2014.
And on the Nest Thermostats you keep seeing ~ there are 114 of them installed throughout the building! Possibly the most installed in a single building yet! And while making the building gold LEED certified made it slightly challenging with regards to central air/heating ~ the dots you see below the Nests are temperature sensors to make adjustments more accurate.
You can even see Google Streetview while navigating maps!
An overview of the office layouts... and the color coded floors...
One more fun detail ~ cute shower icons!
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