By Tuan Huynh
BMW chose the HTC Vive as its virtual reality headset of choice for its vehicle development workstations, proving that VR is more than just for gaming. The company plans on incorporating VR in the early vehicle development process to aid interior design and global collaboration.
With the VR systems, BMW designers can quickly tweak drafts and collaborate with others around the world without physically building the parts, saving time and money. But BMW isn’t just strapping a Vive headset to developers and letting them have their way in the virtual world; there’s a physical component to its development systems as well.
This includes a real interior that designers sit in, which is realistically shaped for precise acoustics and feel so BMW can pipe faux engine noises through the speakers. The VR world BMW uses is powered by Unreal Engine 4 and lets designers simulate driving through a city, determine blind spots of potential designs, and test out ergonomics and comfort with photo-realism — all without building a $30,000 clay model.
All of this requires precise motion tracking, which is a major benefit of the HTC Vive versus the Oculus Rift. HTC’s Vive Lighthouse tracking system helps follow each precise movement to …read more
Source:: techradar.com – Computing Components
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