Headquartered in Detroit, Michigan, General Motors is a global Fortune 100 company with over 212,000 employees on six continents. For over a century, General Motors has developed innovative technologies and shaped the future of the automotive industry.

GM customers today expect their cars to have a variety of “smart” capabilities including things like navigation, social media such as Facebook and music streaming such as Pandora.

In addition to these smart capabilities, GM is developing more and more apps that enable their customers to interact with their smart cars directly from their mobile phones or computers.

Currently, in order to test a new mobile app, GM software developers must reserve and use actual cars, which can cause delays in testing and be very costly.

Matrix is a vehicle simulator that creates virtual cars, which GM developers use to test their applications without the need of actual cars. GM can prototype and test their apps against real-world situations without real-world limitations.

Using The Matrix, GM app developers can create virtual cars traveling along specified map routes. The mobile app being tested receives regular updates of GPS coordinates along with other notifications such as a seat belt being buckled, the wipers being turned on or the air bags being deployed.

Our simulator runs on .NET, and clients connect to it via a RESTful API or through a WCF library. Our companion .NET WPF demo application shows off the features of the API.