Using commercially available virtual reality headsets, such as the Oculus Rift and HTC Vive, the company has developed a complete virtual showroom experience. Using a development of the Unity game engine, the company has gone beyond current gaming development for a 90 frames per second, 6 million polygon rendering capability to bring a cinematic experience to the potential buyer.
More than VR
According to Marcus Kühne, digital retail solutions, Audi AG, every configurable detail for a car can now be visualised and manipulated. From a Parisian backdrop, to the haunting landscapes of Iceland, the car can be visualised anywhere to give the user a personalised experience.
Kühne said that while in markets such as the US and China there is more of a buy from the lot approach, European customers prefer a highly personalised experience on configuring their car and have been willing to wait months for delivery of ‘their’ car. Now, Kühne said that the ability to see the car in every detail is an important tool.
But the effort was significant to develop the technology, said Kühne. Starting more than three years ago, a team of up to 30 specialists, from six different suppliers, worked to achieve a lofty set of specifications to ensure a high quality experience, and one that would not make the user motion sick, says Kühne.
The base performance of 90 fps, with a system latency of sub 30 milliseconds has a high hardware requirement, but it ensures a detailed and enjoyable experience, said Kühne.
Kühne said that it is about more than simply setting colours and trim levels, there is also a x-ray capability to go inside the car and see details of mechanical and electronic specifications that would previously have been impossible.
The virtual showroom is now being made available to Audi dealers across Europe.
Audi’s work in virtual reality is not limited to the showroom.
Safety and assist
Increasingly, the safety and assist features of cars are difficult to demonstrate and do not have their full impact by description only. To allow support technicians, sales professionals and dealers to be able to experience these capabilities fully, Audi has developed its virtual reality capabilities to a full driving experience.
With A4 testbeds, the company has used aviation GPS units, combined with off the shelf virtual reality gear to develop a system whereby the driver can physically drive a car around an open, safe environment, but is presented with driving scenarios to test various car capabilities.
On the test day, this reviewer had the initially unnerving experience of driving a car while wearing a VR headset. While actually being in a large Munich car park, the VR experience was of an urban environment complete with café terraces, shopping streets, pedestrians and other road users. While driving through this setting, a cyclist suddenly dives in ahead of the car, forcing the driver to take action, but the cyclist then veers off to one side and crashes into the café terrace. This kerfuffle distracts the driver to the point where they hardly notice the distracted mother and her push chair who now comes from the opposite side of the road. The A4’s front sensors detect the intrusion and apply the ABS for an emergency stop, without the need for driver input.
Without the VR element, this functionality would be hard to fully demonstrate, and shows the power of visualisation technologies for the future.
Infotaintment
Focusing back on the car and the driver and passenger experience, the onboard infotainment systems have developed significantly and in-car computing power is now five times that of a mere two to three years ago, said Andreas Reich, head of R&D, Audi Electronics.
The Audi cars of the future will not only assist with safety features but will monitor driving patterns and habits, from which it can then infer and offer help, suggestions and solutions.
However, Audi was quick to emphasise the importance of data protection and privacy in these efforts. There is already a pilot programme in operation around personal company cars where a monitoring network allows car parameters to be collected and analysed to build usage profiles. Protected by full encryption, a privacy mode and anonymised collection, the data is collected from some 500 signals, reduced from an initial 7,000, to determine what the car is doing and how.
The systems for control and monitoring are highly segregated too, said Audi, to protect against hacking.
However, a goal and a future development is Personal Intelligent Assistant (PIA). Much like Siri or Cortana, the PIA will function as a safety feature set, as well as an interactive, intelligent assistant to the driver.
Intelligently linked data
“The concept of the PIA predevelopment project is to link data intelligently,” said Audi, “data from the Internet, driver data, data about the current and upcoming traffic situation as well as data from the car. PIA also reacts to voice input, and thanks to intelligent algorithms can interact with the user autonomously and adaptively.”
Audi said that the PIA will go beyond voice and autonomous control, it will learn driver habits and behaviour, adapt to context and circumstance and be able to pre-emptively offer assistance and suggestions to relieve the driver of certain burdens.
Audi said that the PIA will leverage existing services such as Siri, Alexa and Cortana, without the need to re-invent such technologies. While the PIA is a few years off yet, Audi says by the end of the decade, the connectivity platform within the car on which it will rely is already available.
MIB2
The current Audi Virtual Cockpit is now supported by the second-generation Modular Infotainment Platform (MIB2). The company said that MIB2 is the foundation for infotainment in all Audi production models.
The platform uses an NVIDIA T 30 processor, a quad-core chip from the Tegra 3 series. With a clock speed of more 1 GHz and a fast graphics card, it can drive two displays. The Tegra 30 processor can display full 3D, through the use of Rightware software.
The platform is also supported by a custom tablet especially developed by Audi with manufacturer Pegatron, that is designed to cope with the rigours of the car environment, such as vibration, direct sunlight and extremes of heat and cold.
The Audi tablet has a high-resolution 256mm (10.1”) screen and connects to the MMI navigation plus via Wi-Fi, giving passenger access to the radio, media, navigation and car menus. Data transfer is bi-directional, allowing passengers to input the likes of route information, or, conversely, the driver could start a radio or media programme for passengers them from the MMI navigation plus.
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