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Coded from scratch in-house, design studio Seymourpowell has revelled the Virtual Reality set-up it uses for automotive design, giving them the ability to create sketches, curves and surfaces in the virtual environment.
The platform allows teams in different parts of a building, or different geographical locations, to ‘dial in’ and all participate in the design process in real-time via tablets and VR headsets, as if in the same room.
Seymourpowell explain that this inspires greater collaboration, breaking down existing barriers between internal teams by allowing them all to ‘collaborate, interact and give feedback on the design process remotely from anywhere in the world’.
The company also suggest that it has developed new VR sketching functionality, which allows designers to easily duplicate designs, draw complex spline curves, and work within industry safety regulations and parameters to ensure that every design is viable from an early stage.
Seymourpowell believe that their approach to VR design will help to shorten the time it takes to bring a new car ‘from napkin sketch to showroom floor’, allowing the design of new cars to be more reactive to changing consumer needs and expectations, and ultimately produce better quality vehicles by facilitating more effective collaboration between teams within automotive companies.
The technology and tools are continuing to be developed for new applications.
Richard Seale, lead automotive designer at Seymourpowell, commented: “Our new approach to designing in VR radically streamlines the design process, allowing designers, engineers, and marketing teams to collaborate on the design process in exciting new ways.
“It lets designers create designs in 3D and at any scale from the very start of the design process. I believe this is the future of design.”
Using Augmented Reality, Seymourpowell have delivered a solution that allows multiple people to view the VR drawings in realtime without the need for additional headsets.
The tool is said to be compatible with all major PC-Based Virtual Reality headsets.
