As a visitor of the website you can remotely manipulate several features of the car, like turning on and off the lights, honking the horn and making the wiper blades sweep. Furthermore, you can start promotional audio jingles that are being played by a seperate set of speakers, built in behind the front bumper.
My role in this project was getting the data out of the laptop that receives the visitor's input and sending it to the outputs of an interface board, made by Phidgets (the InterfaceKit 8/8/8). The interface kit is attached to the car's electronic circuit, and voila, you can make the car do things from behind your computer at home.
Rotating a little servomotor pulls the wiper blades handle up and down. This motor is also driven by a Phidgets device, the Servo 4-Motor Controller.
I used Phidget's Actionscript 3.0 API, which enabled me to easily communicate with the Red5 server that takes care of sending the visitor's input to one of the laptops in the car.
UPDATE 08.02.2009
The campaign has ended, but here's a video that shows some reactions of passengers:
