ALAMEDA — I just took a ride into the future — or at least one vision of it.

If Mercedes-Benz is right, the car of the future will have a cockpit that looks like a living room, give you the freedom to set up play spaces in the middle of the street, and have more to say to pedestrians than the stereotypical New York cabbie.

It also just might make you seasick.

On Tuesday, I got to ride in Mercedes’ new F015 concept car, which the company was showcasing at a press event here. The F015 is a self-driving car but with a twist. This isn’t a near-term research project into how an autonomous car might work. Instead, the F015 is Mercedes’ attempt to explore what such a car might look and act like in 2030.

So, Mercedes ditched the top-heavy sensor array that bedecks most autonomous vehicles and focused on human-centered design. With the F015, Mercedes explored the ways in which the interaction between cars and humans could change with autonomous vehicles — both for those inside the car and those outside.

The first thing you notice about the F015 is that it looks like something out of a science-fiction movie. Although the new car is about the same size as Mercedes’ flagship S-Class sedans, it looks long and low and stretched out. In the front and back, it has an arrays of LED lights, rather than dedicated head or tail lights. And its front and rear doors open up in opposite ways automatically at the touch of a button, giving users a wide, unobstructed opening to enter.

The main point of the new design was to reconfigure and expand the interior of the car, to take advantage of the fact that a person doesn’t have to be manually in control of it. So, instead of using the typical fixed bucket or bench seats, Mercedes put in the F015 some egg-shaped chairs that look like something you’d find in a hip ’60s-era house. Those seats can turn completely around to allow passengers in the front and back to face each other, as they might on a train. Only this is a cabin with much more leg room than most; you can stretch out your legs without worrying about knocking into your neighbor’s knees.

But it’s not just the seats that make the interior different. The cabin has wood floors and slick glossy plastic sides, making it feel like the inside of an Apple store. Meanwhile, the seats are surrounded by large touch-sensitive screens that Mercedes has seamlessly integrated into the doors, dash and rear of the car. The screens can turn the car into a rolling conference room, man cave or spa, allowing users to make video calls, watch movies or view serene pictures of beautiful landscapes.

The ride I took in the F015 was around an empty parking lot at the old Alameda Naval Air Station. Because we weren’t braving traffic or merging onto highways, it wasn’t like other demonstration rides in self-driving cars. But it did try to simulate what a ride of the future might be like. And it was a strange experience.

I like the idea of being able to turn around and face your fellow passengers, but in practice, it was somewhat disorienting.

That’s because the car made quite a few turns and swerves while we were riding in it and came to a couple of sudden stops. Those types of movements can be difficult to stomach if you are the passenger in a typical car and can see where you’re going. It’s worse if you are unprepared for them; it can make the experience feel more like an amusement park ride than a commuter express.

Mercedes has focused not just on passenger experience with the F015, but also on how the car interacts with people in its environment. In a car today, that role falls to the driver, who can communicate with pedestrians and other drivers using facial expressions, gestures, words, lights and turn signals. A self-driving car is obviously more limited in how it can communicate.

But the F015 explores several communication possibilities. One way is using the LED lights on the front and back of the car as digital signs. The lights can blink in a particular way to indicate to pedestrians when it’s safe to cross or they can spell out “stop” or “slow down” to warn following drivers of traffic obstacles. Mercedes also has played around with the idea of using lasers to project ad hoc crosswalks for pedestrians, to display warning signs to other drivers or to show through a series of arrows and lines where the car is likely to stop or where it’s going.

The company is also exploring how people could use portable beacons to create no-driving zones on the fly. The beacons would work like those that come with the Roomba floor-cleaning robot, alerting self-driving cars that they should not enter a particular area.

Mercedes has obviously put a lot of thought into how our interactions with cars might change as they become autonomous. I’m not sold on the company’s vision — I wouldn’t mind seeing a car with seats that can recline into beds or even a city without any cars at all. But it was fun to see someone looking at cars not through the lens of what we have today but of what they could become.

Contact Troy Wolverton at 408-840-4285 or twolverton@mercurynews.com. Follow him at www.mercurynews.com/troy-wolverton or Twitter.com/troywolv.