I’ve had a few opportunities to play with the Oculus Rift head-mounted VR display over the last year or so, but most of the demonstrations I’ve tried have focused on gaming applications. On the other hand, Ford is using this technology to help designers visualize the interiors and exteriors of new vehicles.
The demonstration, which used a combination of a rare full HD prototype of the Oculus Rift goggles, along with VRED industrial design software from Autodesk allows wearers to sit in a full-scale virtual model of a vehicle.
When wearing the Rift, your can sit inside the vehicle and look around to see every minute detail of the car or truck’s interior, and you can also look at it from outside.
While the demonstration I tested out didn’t let you actually walk around the vehicle, the version being used at Ford’s Design Center is capable of this.
Even if virtual reality doesn’t provide the tactile feedback of working with clay models or prototype vehicles, it does permit designers to test out vehicle layouts at very early stages, as well as to quickly test modifications. As the Oculus Rift continues to improve, and gets closer to a final commercial build, I can only imagine these sort of simulations getting more and more realistic.
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If you have never been to a track day where you take your car and drive on a real racetrack, you may not know that GoPro cameras are as common as drivers at the events. People like to record the track antics for a lot of reasons. Video of your session is good for more than showing off, you can improve your driving significantly with some nice video and telemetry data to help you determine the best speed through corners and certain sectors of the track.
Typically, this involves a camera like a GoPro and some sort of GPS lap tracker along with software for merging your video with the telemetry data. That process is a pain, I can tell you from experience.
Now, GM has announced a really awesome option that will be available later this year when regular production for the 2015 Stingray Corvette kicks off. The option is called the Performance Data Recorder.
The system has a 720p resolution video camera in the windshield header along with a mic in the cabin. Video is recorded to a SD card in a slot in the glove box. The cool part is that the PDR system has a GPS sensor and is hard wired into the car to give all sorts of details on performance. The system can overlay a GPS track map, lap time, RPM, gear selected, G-forces and more over the video it records.
Pricing for the system will be announced closer to launch, but I would expect it to be rather expensive. An aftermarket system with this sort of capability can cost thousands of dollars.
Unless you are a billionaire playboy or a business magnet of some sort, odds are you fly Coach like the rest of us when you travel by air. For the well-heeled, it’s First Class all the way, but for the really rich it’s private jets. A company called Spike Aerospace has a new private jet in the design phase it claims will be the fastest private aircraft in the skies – assuming it launches in 2018 as planned.
The 18-passenger aircraft is called the Spike S-512 and it will have a cruising speed of Mach 1.6. That makes it about twice as fast as a commercial aircraft. The company says a trip to London from New York would take three to four hours in its jet.
One of the biggest challenges to building the aircraft is dealing with the sonic boom when flying over populated areas. The FAA has regulations for sonic booms and those regulations are what greatly limited the usefulness of the Concorde jet when it was in service.
The 131-foot-long aircraft is expected to have a maximum flying range of 4,000 nautical miles, and will between $60 million to $80 million when it launches.
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While many of today’s vehicles have integrated GPS, satellite audio, and even mobile apps, they’re only the tip of the iceberg. Let’s take a look at some amazing high-tech ideas which could find their ways to our cars in the not-too-distant future.
Looking for an empty parking space in a garage or parking lot can be a pain. Car manufacturers recognize this time-waster and are working on solutions which could enable cars to automatically park themselves without the driver present. One of the more intriguing demonstrations of such a technology comes from Scandinavian automaker Volvo. This vehicle’s on-board autonomous driving system can detect the presence of not just other vehicles, but pedestrians as well. All the driver needs to do is exit their vehicle, open up an app on their smartphone, and set the car to Autonomous Parking mode. The car not only finds an open parking space, it takes care of the parking for you. And chances are that it will do a much better job at it than you can, since on-board sensors will ensure the car doesn’t bump into any obstacles. You can see a demonstration of an early prototype of this amazing system in the video clip below:
Can you imagine that someday in the not-too-distant future, your car might be able to detect your mood or state of well-being? Several major auto manufacturers, including Toyota and Ford have been exploring technology to detect driver emotional and physical state. Why might your car need to know how you’re feeling? For starters, this information could be used to dynamically adapt the vehicles ride mode – making the ride more sporty if you’re in an upbeat mood and the road conditions are right.
In addition, being able to detect the driver’s state of mind could help to identify whether they are distracted from driving, and either offer driving assistance, or remind the driver to keep focused on the road. Mood identification could also be used to adapt the music that’s playing in the vehicle – or if the system detects that you are driving tentatively and your emotional state is confused, it could automatically offer help with directions.
Another interesting possibility for future vehicles is the idea that our windshields could double as large display screens, superimposing relevant information directly in our field of view instead of using displays that take our attention off the road. One of the more interesting potential applications comes in the form of augmented reality displays on our windshields. The most obvious use case is for navigation systems that could actually project directions and turn information on the windshield. While some manufacturers already have small heads-up displays that can display speed and GPS data, the real breakthrough will come when our entire windshields can double as transparent displays, using OLED or specialized projection technologies like the one shown here from Pioneer:
This could allow for screens to precisely align relevant information with the scene outside the window. For instance, GM has been working on a system which would use cameras, radar and other sensors to display relevant information on the windshield, such as road hazards and speed limit signs. Such information could also be used to help drivers know about upcoming turns and hazards in low-visibility situations. In fact, there’s already a smartphone app calledHUDWAY which can add a small heads-up GPS display to any vehicle by reflecting the screen of your smartphone onto the windshield glass. Of course, this technology could also be used to display things like emails, text messages and Facebook status updates, so they could create new forms of driving distraction if not thoughtfully developed.
While it may be a number of years before fully fleshed out versions of these technologies find their way into everyday vehicles, it’s a pretty solid bet that some degree of autonomy will be standard on almost every vehicle as we move into the second half of the decade. With safety and fuel efficiency topping driver concerns, there’s no question that automation could improve these aspects of driving. In addition, systems that monitor driver awareness and tools which reduce driver distraction are sure to be front and center in coming years.
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I’ve owned a few cars over the years that had shiny bits in the interior that would glare right in my eyes at certain times of the day. It was very irritating. Ford wants to eliminate that problem and has a slick rig that it uses to simulate the outdoors for use in testing its vehicle interiors.
Ford calls its testing center the Lighting Lab. It’s equipped with 6,000 watts of light that allows the engineers to recreate any lighting condition in the world. The dome-shaped facility has a moving light rig that can recreate conditions simulating lighting from dawn until dusk, changing angle and intensity of the lights to match the time of day.
The goal of the testing process is to reduce the glare on the interior of the car and on vehicle controls and surfaces. The Lighting Lab was used in the development of the 2015 Mustang to create gauges that are legible under all light conditions and an aluminum dash panel that doesn’t glare in driver’s eyes.
“With the Lighting Lab, we can ensure that the first time a buyer sits in the 2015 Ford Mustang, that person will be able to see the interior as the designers originally envisioned it – in the best light possible,” said Mahendra Dassanayake, Ford lighting technical specialist.
LEGO expert Raul Oaida and Steve Sammartino have built themselves the stuff of childhood dreams for many LEGO builders. I know I wanted to build a full-size car I could drive around the neighborhood more times than I can count. Their incredible black and yellow LEGO hot rod consists of over half a million bricks.
This is very cool indeed and the project is known as the Super Awesome Micro Project. It’s unclear exactly how the LEGO-based motor of the car works, but it is said to run on compressed air. The engine has four radial units with 256 pistons. The car isn’t made completely from LEGO, there are some structural pieces, wheels, and tires. I would assume there is some sort of frame that isn’t LEGO.
The car can cruise at speeds of up to 18MPH. It might be able to go faster, but they won’t drive it any faster because of its fragile nature. The car was taken from a concept design to a finished product in 20 months. Incredibly, Oaida built it in Romania, and shipped it to Sammartino for final assembly in Melbourne, Australia.
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