VR Streamlines Mercedes' Development Process

Automotive Industries, March, 2001 by Don Sherman

The sketch pad, air brush and clay model all moved another step toward the history books last April when Daimler-Chrysler (DC) opened a new Virtual Reality Center at its Mercedes-Benz passenger car development center in Sindelfingen, Germany. After only a few months of operation, this supercomputer-driven visualization facility proved so useful that the members of DC'S executive strategy board now approve designs using virtual images instead of physical properties.

How many weeks, Euros and headaches does this tool excise from the car development process? DC experts won't say; instead, they let their technology do the convincing. Al recently visited this new leap forward in computer-aided design to gather the following insights.

Powerwall

Decision-makers and visitors are comfortably seated in a darkened room when a Mercedes C320 wagon zooms across their view. The image is full-size, as realistic as any Hollywood cinema, and rich in detail. Wheels and landscape blur as the wagon motors along a country lane with wispy clouds and bright blue sky cascading across its flanks.

But when a technician manipulates his roller-ball mouse to stop the car and rotate it for static analysis, changing the incident light, the color of the paint and other variables, it becomes clear that we've been watching a "virtual" C320. The metal, rubber and fabric don't exist in the physical sense. This is a too megabyte presentation file that can be displayed and manipulated a million ways on the $100,000 23-by-8-foot screen.

When it's not entertaining visitors, the Powerwall serves as the portal to DC's CATIA-generated data bank. Car designers, fluid-dynamics engineers and ergonomics experts collaborate to solve problems well before the physical prototype stage. Rough concepts can be viewed in everyday traffic. How a minor change of the hood's contour influences air flow over the trunk can be analyzed. A barrier crash can be monitored in slow motion to determine if a structural member collapses on cue. Powerwall's arrival has elevated designers and engineers to a higher cooperative plain.

The Cave

After donning a set of electronic goggles wired to the Virtual Reality Center's supercomputer, the viewer takes a seat inside an 8 foot open cube to be immersed in an holographic sea. A-pillars, the instrument panel and the external world appear as ghost-like, 3-D images. With each nod of the head or twist of the neck, the perspective changes convincingly. Though it lacks the fine detail of the 2-D Powerwall, the Cave is useful for ergonomic analysis and evaluating designs for manufacturing and service accessibility.

Computing Horsepower

DC's Powerwall, Cave, and a 23-by-14-foot cylindrical projection screen (not demonstrated during AI's visit), are all wired to a Silicon Graphics onyx2 workstation. Marketed as the world's most powerful visualization engine" by SGI of Mountain View, Cal., this system simultaneously processes 3-D graphics, 2-D images and video data in real time. Sixty central processing units boast a memory bandwidth of 22.4 gigabytes, one thousand times the computing power of the word processor used to create this text. Fourteen graphics pipes (hardware interfaces) provide high-resolution, large-screen images while also supporting the extensive menu of user commands.

After it's daily visualization tasks are complete, the SGI Onyx2 handles batch compute processing on the night shift. Idle time and coffee breaks aren't part of the deal fora machine that costs a million dollars.