Nissan Motor Co., Ltd. showed members of the media its new design presentation hall at its design and engineering campus in Atsugi, Kanagawa Prefecture. The new facility is aimed to support further digitalization of the design process, enhancing design quality and the scope of the design study to create products that even better match customer needs.
The facility uses an ultrawide 24 K curved screen, full-color ceiling screen, remote lighting, and 7.1-channel sound to create an immersive experience that more realistically replicates real-world customer use, creating new value by fusing the physical and digital.
Conventionally, vehicle designs are checked and approved with physical models.
This can result in long production periods, significant costs and limitations in model variations. More than five years ago, the Nissan design organization started digitally transforming its process, for example through use of VR.
The new facility uses a gaming engine to create projection content, reproducing in real time various environments with a high sense of realism and immersion. This enables designs to be checked in a form that closely resembles the customer-use environment, including changes in light at different times of the day, weather patterns, and other natural elements.
For verification purposes, vehicles can be lined up across the screen and subtle design differences and colors can be closely compared. In addition, the ability to quickly switch model positions and angles in real time allows for faster and easier decision making.
Images projected on the curved screen and ceiling screen can merge with displayed physical models, creating a space that allows designers to expand their imaginations due to the lack of boundary between the real and the digital.
Acting as a creative hub, the new facility is accessible online from anywhere. By removing obstacles to where and when designs can be created, the facility aims to create an inclusive, interactive, flexible and creative environment that facilitates more creative and attractive designs.
Senior Vice President Alfonso Albaisa, head of global design at Nissan, says: “As designers, we are in an exciting time of breakthroughs in development processes within the auto industry. At Nissan, we have been racing forward with our dramatic digital shift just as other industries, like gaming, have been on a race of their own. Our new immersive ‘theater’ harnesses the best of all worlds, gathering state-of-the-art technologies in one dramatic physical and virtual space that creates new levels of inspiration for our teams.
SOURCE: Nissan
