Video: Toyota Hackathon Lets People Make Apps for New Vehicles

When you buy a new car, isn’t it fun to show it off? Even if it’s actually a few years old, for you it’s new. While it sits in your driveway, you wait for your neighbors to notice. When you hang out with friends, you invent reasons to drag them to the parking lot. When you first buy it, you have to post a photo to Facebook.

But imagine how boring that would be if absolutely everything about the car was the same as your last car. Imagine that nothing was new, there were no surprises, and that there really wasn’t anything in your new car that wasn’t in your old car. How lame would that be?

Toyota knows how important it is to make new features. Every time we get behind the wheel of something new, Toyota wants our eyebrows about one centimeter higher than usual. To that end, the above video is about Toyota’s hackathon, an event where computer programmers are invited to use vehicle data to power new apps.

In this case, the focus was drones. A bunch of experts in these unmanned flying machines were paired with programmers and documenters to make something cool for Toyota. The team of hackers that drew the focus of the video wanted to make an app that would tell a drone to automatically follow the car, swooping around lazily, and sending streaming video with its camera to a passenger inside or possibly even someone else far away.

Why exactly would you want this? Who knows. The goal of the weekend was to dream dreams. It’s only by thinking outside the box and playing around with things that creativity has room to breathe. In any case, check out this video of Toyota’s hackathon.

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