Testing automotive HMI (Human-Machine Interfaces) in actual prototype cars under real-world conditions is an option that rarely presents itself to the UX and product teams of automotive OEMs. They often resort to suboptimal workarounds, like static mockups, which lack interactivity and fail to deliver an authentic test user experience. This creates ripple effects across the entire product development cycle.

Here’s a quick rundown of the problem at hand:

Testing HMIs in actual prototype cars is a rare luxury for UX and product teams.

Most teams rely on static mockups that lack interactivity and fail to simulate real driving conditions.

 development has begun, making fixes time-consuming and expensive.

What could’ve been a simple design tweak becomes a complex, multi-team fix.

Even the seating bucks, used to simulate a cockpit, fail to recreate real driving conditions.

Simulated environments often rely on game-like data, missing the nuances of actual road scenarios.

In the automotive industry, HMI is not just about aesthetics; it’s about 

Interactions must be intuitive and distraction-free to prevent accidents.

That’s why it's essential to test HMIs as close to the real product as possible, using real-world data and interactions.

Enter RemotiveLabs & ProtoPie: A Game-Changing Combo

To overcome the challenges of realistic UX testing, you need two key ingredients:

An HMI that looks and behaves like the final product.

Real driving data that powers interactions in real time.

That’s exactly what ProtoPie and RemotiveLabs deliver, together.

The Ideal Prototyping Duo: ProtoPie & RemotiveLabs

With ProtoPie, static mockups are transformed into interactive, high-fidelity prototypes trusted by companies like BMW and Mercedes to accelerate development and shift testing earlier in the process. Designers and product teams can easily build prototypes that go far beyond basic visuals, enabling real interactions and logic.

But visual realism is only half the battle. For prototypes to truly reflect real-world conditions, they need real data. That’s where RemotiveLabs steps in. With RemotiveCloud, you can feed actual vehicle data into your prototype in just a few clicks. Whether you're simulating driving scenarios or connecting to a live vehicle, RemotiveLabs makes it easy. With RemotiveBroker, you can even stream real-time car data directly into your Pie.

This combination doesn’t just look like the final product; it acts like it, too. And that’s what makes it so powerful.

Interested in how you can use ProtoPie and RemotiveLabs to create an interactive high-fidelity prototype using real car data? 

Leveraging interactive high-fidelity prototyping in combination with real-world data opens up a whole new world when it comes to automotive UX design. It shifts the entire ideation and iteration process to the left in the development cycle.

 Designers can test and refine concepts in realistic environments long before a line of production code is written.

 Real data enables more accurate, scenario-specific testing, revealing interaction flaws that static prototypes often miss.

 Catching usability issues early eliminates the need for expensive fixes down the line.

 Prototypes powered by actual vehicle data allow teams to validate critical interactions under realistic driving conditions.

Explore how ProtoPie users are already leveraging RemotiveLabs’ platform 

By combining ProtoPie and RemotiveLabs, companies can create prototypes that not only look like the final product but behave like it, too. 

This allows for more authentic, data-driven user testing far earlier in the design process than typically possible.

Sharper insights, faster iterations, and significantly more confidence before entering development.

 This approach doesn’t just impress stakeholders - it fundamentally changes the way automotive companies validate their UX design. And the best part? It’s a repeatable process that any designer and engineer in any industry can adopt.

 on the road ahead towards the future of automotive UX.

Learn how combining ProtoPie and RemotiveLabs enables major automotive OEMs to prototype and test automotive interfaces with real vehicle data.

Automotive UX Design with ProtoPie and RemotiveLabs

On March 19, 2025, the ProtoPie team joined an exciting lineup of industry leaders at the 

5th China Automotive Human-Machine Interaction (HMI) & Experience Design Innovation Conference

 hosted by Gasgoo in Shanghai. As the automotive world races into a more innovative, more intuitive future, this annual event brought together designers, engineers, and innovators to explore how technology is reshaping the in-car experience.

, our APAC Business Development Manager, delivered a standout presentation titled 

“Integrating AI and Hardware into HMI Design”

. His talk focused on solving one of today’s biggest HMI challenges: bridging the gap between software design and hardware execution - without needing to write a single line of code.

APAC Business Development Manager Link Li, presenting how ProtoPie supports companies to “Integrate AI and Hardwre into HMI Design”

Link introduced ProtoPie as the go-to platform for building 

 that seamlessly integrate both hardware elements and AI-powered services. With tools like 

, designers can validate their ideas in real-world environments long before development begins.

You can watch a recording of the full speech and presentation here: 

Integrating AI and Hardware into HMI Design

Innovating at the Intersection of AI and Hardware

One of the key messages from Link’s session was the 

. He cited real-world examples where a lack of early testing led to poor user adoption - even when the visuals were compelling. With ProtoPie, designers can simulate user interaction with hardware such as 

Seating Buck Setup showcasing multi-display and cross-device prototyping powered by ProtoPie

The crowd was especially intrigued by how ProtoPie integrates 

 using APIs and bridge apps. These capabilities unlock advanced interaction designs, from 

personalized, multimodal HMI design powered by AI and 3D visualization

 - echoed across the speaker lineup. Companies like Unity, EPIC Games, Qt, and Zeekr shared their insights into 3D cockpit interfaces, emotional design, and AR-HUD innovations.

As automotive UX moves from functional to experiential, the demand for 

design tools that can keep up with this shift

 is growing. ProtoPie is proud to be among the tools leading this charge.

ProtoPie’s booth saw a steady stream of traffic after Link’s presentation, with many attendees heading straight over to try the live demo. The 

 we handed out were a hit (who knew?), and the 

“ProtoPie is the go-to tool in our team every day.” 

ProtoPie Car Fresheners - Hugely popular with our visitors!

 and more targeted engagement. It’s clear that when it comes to the future of automotive HMI, designers want tools that are fast, flexible, and ready for the real world.

“ProtoPie is the best software for bringing designs to life right now - a must-buy product.” 

Link Li, APAC Business Development Manager at ProtoPie, talking to the After Sales System Lead at General Motors China.

We’ve made a lot of new valuable connections at this year’s event. From OEMs like 

Geely and BMW to Honda and Chery Automobile

, we’re looking forward to reconnecting at the upcoming 

As automotive HMI design continues to evolve, ProtoPie remains committed to empowering designers to 

bring their visions to life faster, smarter, and more collaboratively

. Events like Gasgoo’s HMI Conference remind us just how powerful these conversations can be.

 on the road ahead and the innovations in UX we’ll see along the way!

ProtoPie showcased the future of HMI prototyping at Gasgoo’s 2025 Conference in Shanghai, highlighting key UX trends and real-world design validation.

Driving the Future of Auto UX: ProtoPie at Gasgoo HMI 2025

The need for prototypes that feel as if you’re actually moving

Nothing beats UX testing on ‘the real thing. ’ But when you’ve spent any time working in automotive HMI design, you know that testing your designs in an actual prototype car is a rare luxury. 

If you’re lucky, you may have access to a buck setup for judging your UI visuals and ergonomics in a semi-realistic layout.


The lack of realism gets particularly tricky when user testing. As a researcher, you’ll have to do a lot of explaining to provide your test users with enough context to understand what they’re looking at (“

Now imagine you’re driving on the highway at 120km/h.

RemotiveLabs has developed something that could alleviate this missing realism. Their tools provide streams of real vehicle data (telemetry, location, etc.), which can help automotive software developers test applications with realistic data in their simulators.


This allows for multiple ways to power simulations: 

Choose from a pre-made library of sample recording,

Upload your own signal data files (e.g., BLF, ASC, or MF4)

Or even connect an actual vehicle for a live data stream to test your HMI designs under real-world conditions.

Wouldn’t it be nice if we could test our interactive car UI prototypes with real car data?


Test prototypes of instrument clusters with realistic data (-visualizations).

Use vehicle data to bring infotainment mockups to life.

Duct tape a touch screen into any car and feed live data into a prototype UI.

Being curious how easy it is for an automotive UX designer like myself to incorporate this into a real-world design prototype, I decided to try and integrate RemotiveLabs’ tools into a typical UI design workflow.

Our UI Experiment: Figma, Protopie, and RemotiveCloud

Today’s de facto UI design tool is Figma. Design teams and their stakeholders use it to collaboratively iterate on design proposals.

Ideally, these design iterations also include testing:

Designers need to test their design proposals to evaluate the dynamic aspects of their concepts ‘in motion.’

User researchers need to do user tests with actual users to test intuitiveness, learnability, and ergonomic factors.

Unfortunately, Figma’s prototyping features are a bit rudimentary and usually not sufficient for automotive purposes. So, for interactive prototyping, I prefer another tool: Protopie.

RemotiveCloud streaming vehicle data into an HMI prototype on a touch display


In the automotive world, Protopie is a popular prototyping platform because it allows the use of multiple simultaneous (touch) displays, sensors, and complex conditional logic. 

We will need a Protopie license that includes Protopie Connect (an add-on to Protopie that allows prototypes to communicate with external devices and data sources).

To begin with, we’ll take the  automotive dashboard UI from Figma and bring it into Protopie to add the interactivity.

Once we have the prototype set up in Protopie, we’ll make a connection with RemotiveLabs’ toolset and drive various objects in our UI with streams of vehicle data.

If we can figure out how to do this, the world’s our oyster: we can use real vehicle data as parameters for controlling any aspect of our user interface.


Above is the HMI design for a fictitious urban micro car

We will be making an infotainment screen for a fictitious urban mini-mobility vehicle. It has a basic central touchscreen, which functions as both a simple infotainment screen and as the instrument cluster.

The vehicle is designed for short trips around town (typically < 30 minutes), so functionality-wise, we will keep the system simple:

An instrument cluster with the basic information needed for driving the vehicle.

A music section, which offers digital radio and a Bluetooth music connection to your phone.

Let’s go: setting up the demo project in Figma

In this experiment, we’ll be feeding real vehicle data into various aspects of the instrument cluster section of the screen.

To make this work, we don’t need to do anything special in Figma. We can set up the design as we always do. Needless to say, it will make everyone’s lives easier if all layers have meaningful names - but that’s good practice, anyway.


Getting your Figma frames into Protopie is literally easy as pie. The kind folk at Protopie provide a plugin for Figma, which lets you import frames from Figma and turn them into fully editable Protopie “scenes”.

Your Figma design will typically carry over 95% intact. The main things I have seen break in the conversion are:

Background blurs (for that popular frosted glass effect)

Image aspects, which can typically be easily corrected in Protopie

To bring gradients (e.g., for masks) over from Figma to Protopie, I recommend copying the gradient layers in Figma as SVG and pasting them in Protopie.

Download ProtoPie's Figma Import Plugin here: 

Preparing the ProtoPie for real-time data inpu

The first thing we need to do is to make any layer or object that we want to manipulate ready to receive changes. We do this by selecting the objects and clicking the “Make editable” button for each of them.

Again, double-check that each layer has a meaningful name because you will need to find them back in a dropdown list.

Once all the layers you want to manipulate using real-time data are editable, it’s time to set up the RemotiveLabs data stream we want to use.


Selecting the vehicle data parameters we want to use in our prototype

For my experiment, I’ve been using the free trial license of 

, which gives access to a number of trial recordings that provide dozens of different variables and signals to feed into our demo.

In the web environment, we can cherry-pick the signals we want to use in our prototype. And there’s no need to do it all at once; we can always come back later to add or remove signals from our selection.

I prefer to use VSS signals when they’re an option over OEM-specific signals. VSS stands for “Vehicle Signal Specification”, a standardization protocol for automotive data from Covesa. 

 The nice thing about VSS is that all signals have meaningful, descriptive names. 

Sometimes, it takes a bit of searching for the right signal name, but usually, they are quite easy to identify thanks to their naming format:

Vehicle.Powertrain.TractionBattery.StateOfCharge.Displayed


The signal names are important! We will need to refer to these in our prototype.


When we’re done we can look up the exact configuration command needed for running our prototype. We’ll paste this command in a terminal window later, so make sure you save it in a location where it can be easily retrieved every time we want to run our prototype.


RemotiveCloud natively supports Protopie communication

Feeding the VSS signals into our ProtoPie

There’s one last thing we need to do in Protopie before we can run our prototype: make the Pie listen and respond to the VSS signals we selected from the RemotiveCloud stream.

Make a global variable, e.g., a numerical variable named “speed”

Make a trigger that will respond when it receives a VSS signal from Protopie Connect. It will listen to the name we found in the data stream, e.g., “Vehicle.Speed”

Add the response: We can put the value we received in a text layer we prepared for this purpose (or change the color of an object, make something [in]visible, etc.).


That’s all. Obviously you can use all of Protopie’s extensive logic features to add complex conditional functionality and rich visualisations, way beyond just changing a number on the screen.


Tell Protopie how to receive vehicle data and what to do with it

Getting the prototype to run for the first time

We’re now only a few steps away from seeing our prototype run with real data!


Save your Pie (the Protopie file) on a local drive, so Protopie Connect can get access to it. Then, run Protopie Connect and locate your local prototype.

Press the little “Display” button next to your imported Pie to open up a Protopie demo window. This is the window our interactive prototype will run in.

2. Open the RemotiveCloud in a browser window

Go to the browser tab where we configured our data stream. Press Play to start sending data. You may need to restart the stream at some point if it runs out before we’re done (depending on the length of the selected stream).

3. Perform some command-line magic in a Terminal window

Next, open a terminal window and paste our command line string into it (assuming you have already installed RemotiveCLI. If not, this is a great time for that). RemotiveCLI will serve as our bridge between the data streaming from the RemotiveCloud and our Protopie demo.

Protopie Connect, showing the incoming data stream




When everything is set up correctly, it should automatically detect that both Protopie Connect and our RemotiveCloud data stream are in place: you should see all the relevant data points scrolling by in the Protopie Connect window.

A hands-on tutorial on using ProtoPie, RemotiveCloud and Figma to bring car UIs to life with actual vehicle signals.

Automotive UI Prototyping with Real Car Data

Today’s UX landscape demands more than static designs. High-fidelity prototyping allows designers to create dynamic, interactive experiences that closely mirror the final product. The ability to simulate realistic user interactions across multiple platforms ensures a design is functional, intuitive, and implementation-ready.

But not all prototyping tools offer the same level of flexibility. Let’s compare 

 to see which one gives you the freedom to design without limits.

ProtoPie vs. Play: What’s the Difference?

Play is positioned as a UX design and prototyping tool for iOS-native experiences, while ProtoPie is built for a broader range of use cases. Here’s how they compare:


While Play offers direct mobile-based prototyping, its limitations become evident when compared to ProtoPie’s flexibility.

, making it a restrictive choice for teams that need multi-platform compatibility. In contrast, 

 empowers UX designers and product teams to build 

Because Play is iOS-focused, it lacks the versatility needed for industries like 

, where cross-platform prototyping is crucial. ProtoPie supports these industries with 

sensor-based interactions, API integrations, and multi-screen prototyping

, making it the preferred choice for complex, real-world scenarios.

, which can be useful for Apple-focused developers but limit flexibility. ProtoPie, however, is 

logic-driven prototypes with advanced interactions, sensor-based

. This means designers aren’t restricted to a predefined design language. They can create experiences that truly match their vision.

 is designed for true-to-life interactive prototyping 

delivering a high-fidelity prototyping experience regardless of the environment you work in or for.

 requiring multiple screens and input methods, ProtoPie adapts to your needs. With 

, teams can prototype real-world scenarios involving multiple devices, displays, hardware, and APIs.

ProtoPie is designed to meet the needs of individual designers and large teams, offering seamless scalability as projects grow in complexity. For enterprises, it provides robust features, such as 

, that facilitate collaboration across multiple stakeholders and ensure a streamlined workflow from ideation to final implementation.

For enterprises that require enhanced security and integrations, 

 offers dedicated support, and advanced integration options with existing design and development tools.

 for iOS, and want to leverage Apple’s native iOS elements, Play might be an interesting tool to explore.

a no-code, powerful, flexible, and future-proof prototyping tool

cross-platform support, advanced interactions, and scalability

 make it the superior tool for UX designers and product teams looking to create the best user experiences without limitations.

and take your prototyping to the next level.

ProtoPie or Play? Discover the differences and see which tool you should choose for the best high-fidelity prototyping experience.

ProtoPie vs. Play: High-Fidelity Prototyping At Different Levels

Pi Day, celebrated on March 14th each year by math enthusiasts, scientists, and creatives alike, is a nod to the mathematical constant 

 (pi), which starts at 3.14 and continues infinitely.

At ProtoPie, Pi Day is more than a celebration of numbers; it’s a tribute to 

 Much like how prototyping allows designers to explore, iterate, and refine ideas without limits.

Think fast, prototype smart, and push the boundaries of UX design within the spirit of Pi Day!

Create a high-fidelity prototype that’s within 3.14 seconds in interaction time. Use ProtoPie’s advanced features to create a seamless and dynamic interaction. Your prototype can be any level of fidelity, but high-fidelity prototypes will be scored higher. We encourage you to use the following topics and features:


 Explore mathematical concepts, visualize Pi as a symbol, or delve into its limitless nature.

 Think outside the box and surprise us with your unique interpretation of Pi Day.

Loop interactions for smooth, continuous flows.

Chained interactions for realistic, multi-step experiences.

 Use ProtoPie Studio to create your high-fidelity prototype.

Follow ProtoPie on LinkedIn and share your prototype on your LinkedIn feed in the form of a video or a GIF (not more than 3.14s). 

 The most creative and impressive prototypes will win exciting prizes.

 How unique and innovative is your concept?

 How well does your prototype showcase the capabilities of ProtoPie?

 How well does your prototype capture the spirit of Pi Day?

 How close to the 3.14-second time mark can you make your prototype?


Our team’s internal prototyping experts will choose the top two most innovative pies. In addition, a special Recognition Award will be given to the Pie with the most engagement on its LinkedIn post!


to keep you fueled during long prototyping sessions!

Plus 1-month free upgrade to the ProtoPie Pro plan 

(if already subscribed, 1 month of extra subscription will be added!)

Don't miss out on this exciting opportunity to celebrate Pi Day, showcase your prototyping skills, and win amazing prizes. Start brainstorming your ideas and get ready to create a high-fidelity prototype that will impress the judges and the ProtoPie community.


The challenge will run from March 14th to March 31st

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