Ford's designers are learning to create 3D cars in VR
cnet.com
cnet.com
Sure, the VR sketch might be useful, but the visual part of the video is quite a lot of marketing spin when it’s not showing the abstract lines.
And I’m not sure that VR is the best way to “feel” a car in this way either. A car is an extension of your body, so it’s just as important where/what your shoulders, knees and legs are/feel as to what the eyes can see.
I've seen some noise about VR used to locate pipes and wires when digging. That seems pretty legit.
I've also heard of VR used in conjunction with building construction, although it's less obvious to me just how useful it would be.
Yeah resolution could be better but it's far from being a deal breaker for viz, modelling etc.
Curious to hear what you thought the blockers were?
You can't make Angry Birds or w/e on the VR equivalent of a Blackberry. No one's made the iPhone yet.
1. Resolution is hopelessly too low for working with text
2. Ergonomics too awkward to wear for 8 hours at a time.
3. Total lack of multi-plane focus, no ability to sense depth beyond a few meters
These are strictly true for every HMD available, having owned and worked with them all extensively since DK2. I wish it wasn't true either, but it's just where we're at. One big thing that has been solved is tracking though. It's easy to forget what a quantum leap Lighthouse was in consumer grade tracking technology. Having sub-millimeter precise tracking and pose estimation was a huge part of getting VR to an MVP. That gives me hope the other problems can be solved, but there's a long way to go with the need for things like integrated eye tracking, foveated rendering, and full vision FOV being table stakes for a real consumer product.
Animations: https://www.facebook.com/groups/virtual.animation/
Paintings: https://www.facebook.com/groups/virtual.paintings/
Compared to looking at a flat computer screen, I would think this would certainly be a move in the right direction.
Do you have any reference for that?
If so, they wouldn't need gravity sketch at all. The most popular CAD programs already have VR support:
Rhino -> https://www.mindeskvr.com/
Maya -> https://www.marui-plugin.com
3dsMax -> 3dsMax Interactive (Autodesk)
Blender -> https://github.com/MARUI-PlugIn/BlenderXR
For example, when designing something for 3dprinting, I sometimes prefer modeling programs over CAD programs because I have control over, for example, however a sphere is made up (the style of polygons, tesselation, that sort of thing). When you're slicing for a 3d printer, you can get odd bugs if your stl is made in a non-optimal way.
For example, you're designing the car on the computer. You put on the VR headset, and suddenly your computer chair becomes the driver's seat. You can look around at your surroundings. Do the dash controls and buttons feel like they're in a good location? Does reaching for the handbrake feel natural or is it too far forward or back? If you look in the rear view mirror do you have a good view, or is the back window causing it to be limited?
Then you can quickly jump out of VR, make a few adjustments, and jump back in. Or get in VR and quickly A/B test different multiple saved versions of the interior.
It would also be good for general feedback. Get some people off the street and toss them in VR to walk around your car. I could see it being more effective and accurate than looking at photos, or 3D renders.
> "If you wanted to make an interior and an exterior, you're still talking months," versus approximately 20 hours in the VR tool, he says.
If Gravity Sketch were on a traditional 2D screen instead of in VR, would the designers still accomplish in hours what used to take months? Conversely, if the VR visualization were to be added to the tools and processes that currently take months to prototype a model, would a similar boost in productivity be observed?
I'm pretty sure it isn't. Just like about everything in human experience, almost nothing can be replicated just as well in VR. VR can give you a rough sense of space, but your body has no sensation, no touch, no feedback, it's so far from reality that you can't really just rely on VR to design things.
Plus, there are things that you don't notice in short time but need to "sink in" with everyday and long-term usage. This is also very hard to replicate in VR.
It doesn't need to be the Holodeck to be useful.
Tools like Gravity Sketch, and the tool I’m making, are great for conceptualization and communication.
In seconds to minutes you can take an idea from your head and show it to someone else. You can have an idea for a product ready to show your peers and in moments they can offer feedback and make changes.
Tools like this aren’t replacing the final engineering yet, but they’re making the planning and communication stage dramatically more efficient.
Reach out to me at my personal email: ian.kettlewell@gmail.com
That goes for anyone else reading this as well. If anyone is working in this space or wants to chat about VR design tools I am interested in talking to you.
Side note, I think the work process for designing the exterior of cars is to create a sculptures with clay, transfer to clay to CAD, and rinse and repeat. I wonder if VR will ever beat manual sculpting.
Wouldn't the title be equally as correct written as "create VR cars in 3D", or even just "create cars in VR".
And that's before mentioning that 'create' is ambiguous. Build or design???
Could someone convince me on the use case? I get that designing a car in 20 hours is 'better' than in 20 weeks. But with all the 1000s of hours put into other considerations, is this going to make any appreciable difference to anything?
As far as the title, I think just dropping the "3D" might make it better?
As Paul Graham says, all good ideas have an "ugly duckling" phase.
I don’t think we need a radically new design for cars? ‘The Homer’ comes to mind. >.>
I still don't think that the hand controllers they're using are the best input device. I can imagine a hybrid approach where design teams are using standard surface modeling like Alias/3Ds Max/Blender for the bulk of the design work and then VR systems like this for review.
When I tried tiltbrush for the first time I was immediately struck by how easy it was to create some things, but how much of a pain it was to modify things, or make things like parallel lines or surfaces.
Maybe everyone is waiting for someone else to do it. Even the linked software (gravity sketch) seems to be missing constraints, dimensions, and snaps, though it has control points so modification of existing geometry is at least possible.
What gives?
Could you expand?