Cost-Effective Car Modeling

Market: enterprise automaker

Problem Space: cost-effective and easily-accessible design collaboration

Problem: an important stage in the process for designing new cars is modeling the car in life-size, utilizing a clay exterior layered onto a substructure typically made of a lighter material (such as foam). The clay exterior allows the designers to easily edit the body shape during the design process. A typical design process may require multiple clay models, sometimes with full interior mockups for the car built inside of the clay exterior. With today’s modern global workforce, this creates difficulty with collaborating on design iteration with other key stakeholders who may be physically located far away from one another. Some possible cost-effective solutions, such as video chat, fail to convey important details of 3-dimensional design as it flattens the object into 2-dimensional space (i.e. on a screen).

Solution: utilizing the mood board as our core concept, our team built a mood room proof-of-concept application that utilizes augmented reality devices to project both 2- and 3-dimensional digital media into shared virtual space. The mood room enables real-time, speech-enabled, networked collaboration with anyone else in the world through the shared virtual space (AR-enabled device required). The position/rotation/scale of the content can be manipulated anywhere in your physical space by utilizing the easily-to-use bounding-cube UI that can be toggled on and off using the sticky menu buttons that align with your gaze. Uploading and removing content in real-time is achieved through a react-native web-interface that allows you to set up and manage as many different mood rooms as you like, with broad file-type support for the media-uploader. Each mood room is linked to a unique QR code so any room can be joined on-demand by scanning the QR code using your AR-enabled device.