For a guy who has long harboured a passion for computers and cars, Project Detroit was pretty much a slice of heaven for Jeff Sandquist.
The former Estevan resident, who resides in Sammamish, Wash., where he is employed as senior director in developer relations for Microsoft, was recently part of an ambitious undertaking that combined the best of two of the world's most important industries.
Sandquist and a crew that included colleagues from Microsoft and the team at West Coast Customs, put together a Ford Mustang that is brimming with horsepower under the hood and technological horsepower almost everywhere else.
A graduate of the Estevan Comprehensive School, Sandquist has been employed by Microsoft since 1997 when the company recruited him to their headquarters in Washington.
His developer relations team is comprised of what he called "technical evangelists" whose job is to go around the world and speak with software developers in hopes of getting them to create applications for such products as Windows and the Windows phone.
"We do that in a lot of ways. I run massive events that have 10,000-plus people in person and hundreds of thousands that tune in online and watch them. My team creates those experiences and runs those events worldwide," Sandquist said. "We also have an online channel that gets 67 million unique visitors per month that me and a friend created at Microsoft called Channel 9. Channel 9 is a software developer community where we do videos and things like that. We did that a year before YouTube ever existed so we were kind of pioneers in the online space."
Interestingly enough, the road that led Sandquist and his team to the Mustang project began with the Kinect, a product that was created for the Xbox to allow Microsoft to compete with, and in many respects surpass, the Nintendo Wii.
The motion detection system uses a webcam to track the motions of gamers and allows them to play games without a controller. Although it was designed for the Xbox 360, a number of computer enthusiasts, including Sandquist and members of his team, began seeking other uses for the Kinect.
"We started messing around to see what would happen if you plug it into your computer and wrote some custom software around it," Sandquist said. "We started doing these hacks, and actually became the team at Microsoft that officially got behind seeing what would happen if the community started writing software around Kinect."
The first hack the team completed was a Kinect driveable reclining lounge chair where the user could sit down and use their hands to drive the chair forwards, backwards and from side to side. Sandquist said a video of their project ultimately made it online and became an Internet sensation around the globe.
"We ended up creating this crazy T-shirt cannon that you can basically drive by using an accelerometer on your phone and fire it. The cool thing is we put cameras on the cannon so through the phone you could see where it was driving. We actually put wireless video cameras on the shirts so you can see the shirts on the big screens at these events when you are shooting them," said Sandquist who added that his team also used the Kinect to create Rock'Em Sock'Em robots that were operated by the movements of the user.
"We do it to inspire software developers and it allows us to show developers that here is something crazy you may be able to do or here is something really interesting. We ship all of the source code online so that developers can take it and do them too."
While working on the recliner, one of his fellow team members told Sandquist that since he was a car guy, he should consider building a car. Later that same night he flipped on his TV and came across the Discovery Channel show West Coast Customs.
On the show, the West Coast Customs team, which is led by owner Ryan Friedlinghaus and first gained attention on the popular MTV show Pimp My Ride, build amazing custom vehicles for celebrity clients and major corporations alike.
After watching the show, Sandquist thought a marriage between Microsoft and West Coast Customs might be a perfect way to get out the word about their products and also inspire developers at the same time. So he picked up the phone, called Friedlinghaus and before long the duo was dreaming up plans for a custom car.
"We joined him for his TV show and we worked together to build the most badass car that we could think of," he said. "I wanted it to look cool, I wanted it to look awesome and not look like an advertisement."
To achieve that goal, they took a 2012 Mustang, removed the body and replaced it with a street legal replica of a 1967 Mustang, giving them the best of both worlds - the classic Mustang look with a completely modern undercarriage and electronics.
"It wasn't like just quickly doing a body swap. We had to re-engineer the car, reinforce the frame and ensure that we had the right clearance and do it all for this reality show."
As it follows a similar pattern as other shows such as American Choppers, where the company gains a customer and then presents them with a finished product months later, the cars on West Coast Customs are usually done with minimal help from the client. However, in this case, where so much technology was in play, Sandquist and his team "embedded" themselves with the West Coast Customs team in Corona, Calif., and worked with them from start to finish.
"If you start from the front of the car to the back, the first thing is you can control the entire car with your phone. But the next thing we did was took the Kinects, the very same ones you have plugged into your Xbox, and we put one in the front and we put two in the rear of the car.
"You can be anywhere around the world and you can see out the front of your car and the back of your car. Imagine your alarm is going off and you want to see what's going on; you can do that with your phone."
The team also put in a public address system which allows the owner to talk into the phone and speak through the car.
Inside the Mustang, the team again used technology to its fullest extent. They removed the instrument panel and replaced it with a Windows 8 slate computer which was tied into the car's own electronic system enabling them to create a panel that displays all data in real time.
"You can swipe (the tablet) and the view is the (instrument panel) of a '67 Mustang. You can swipe it again, you get a 2012 instrument cluster. Swipe it again and you get this metro design that we came up with. It all works, all in real time. Everything we did we wanted it to be real."
The passenger side also includes a slate which can control many of the features and see through the cameras on the front and back.
"We also took a projector and projected it through to the rear window. The '67 Mustang has this awesome pane of glass on the back so what we wanted to do is be able to send messages to the person driving behind you. It allows you to tell them 'hey, you're driving too close.' You can also send videos to the rear window.
"The windshield, we actually embedded in the dash of the car multiple projectors. We wanted to create heads-up displays. What we did differently here was that we actually took it and made it so it's like augmented reality. If there are businesses coming up in front of you, we will put pinpoints down and give you what that point of interest is. We can give weather information in real time because we pull it off the Internet because the car has full Internet. The passenger on his or her heads-up display can actually play Xbox."
The Xbox was also featured heavily at the rear of the car as the back window can be lifted to a 90 degree angle to allow people to play the video game system which is located in the trunk.
Sandquist said the experience of working on the car and also being part of a reality TV show was a wild ride. After going through the pre-planning stages, the actual build was an eight week process and they were just able to make their deadline thanks to a number of days where they slept for a couple of hours at a time. Upon completion, they transported the car to suburban Seattle where it was unveiled at a shopping mall.
The episode of West Coast Customs featuring Sandquist and the Mustang is scheduled to air on Discovery World April 11 at 6 p.m.
