British independent automaker Aston Martin is empowering car designers with a mixed reality (MR) solution to enhance design steps and iterations.
Known for their luxury products and customer service, the firm is using hardware solutions from Lenovo and Varjo to create immersive experiences for car designers.
Finnish MR firm Varjo is using the XR-3 headset to deliver the immersive experience for Aston Martin, so designers working on the high-performance DBX sport utility vehicle (SUV) can look closely at 3D renders to refine tiny details such as stitching colours.
In a promotional video, Peter Freedman, Aston Martin Lagonda’s Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer, says the MR solution takes the automotive firm a “step further from what we can normally do,” compared with the limited views of standard car configurators.
MR Solutions in the Automotive Design Industry
MR allows designers to see the new DBX SUV up-close and at any angle, with brilliant visualisations offering designers a true-to-life representation of the vehicle.
But MR hardware is very demanding of operating systems and requires strong desktop devices, so Aston Martin turned to Chinese tech giant Lenovo, who provides state-of-the-art workstations.
Aston Martin is running its XR experience on the Lenovo’s Nvidia-ready ‘ThinkStation P620’ and, as a result, the design experience runs smoothly without drops in framerate.
Design costs are already expected to lower due to cheap and instant MR design iterations, this could mean that MR-ready production cycles are just the start for Aston Martin.
