Since 2009, during their early days at Google, Waymo have been developing self driving car technology. Today, their fully self-driving cars are on public roads. They use a range of technology to see, identify, predict and plan to ensure a safe ride.

But only a handful of people can actually experience being driven by them.

For everyone else it’s still difficult to feel comfortable with the idea of a self-driving car.

Our brief was to help people understand the technology at the heart of a Waymo car, and build trust in fully self-driving cars.

We created a way for anyone, anywhere, to experience how Waymo’s fully self-driving technology works, and to feel what it’s like to ride in one of their cars.

The Waymo 360° Experience uses the YouTube 360 format because it’s the perfect platform to see the world as the car sees it, demonstrating how the car processes data from all around it.

The experience brings to life the technology Waymo uses from LiDAR, which builds up a detailed picture of the world, to Radar which detects how far away objects are and their speed.

Viewers can also see how the car predicts what each object will do, and how it plans a route forward – for the first time ever – they can experience what it’s like to be a passenger.

The journey was filmed on public roads, and the data visualization was created using raw information gathered on that journey.