Audi Has Deployed 1,000 VR Showrooms in Dealerships Worldwide
German car maker Audi was quick to see the potential of VR and has been experimenting since the early days of VR’s resurgence to see how the tech could be used to enhance the car buying experience. Having introduced VR showrooms into dealerships as early as 2016, the company now has some 1,000 VR deployments in dealerships across the globe.
But that bottleneck—of converting each year’s new lineup of vehicles—was a pain point for making the company’s VR deployments effective. Schweiger and his team sought a means of automating the process of optimizing the models until they could be rendered in real-time.
Audi worked with a company called 4D Pipeline to develop a solution which would greatly reduce the complexity of the models by combining the many individual pieces into larger pieces, there by drastically reducing GPU draw calls while keeping geometric detail in tact.
And the results are very impressive indeed. Schweiger showed a handful of screenshots and flyby videos of the optimized models—which are ready to be rendered in VR at 90 FPS—revealing a very crisp look with realistic lighting, reflections, and interactions (like opening & closing doors and turning on & off headlights), both inside and outside of the vehicles.
See the full story here: https://www.roadtovr.com/audi-has-deployed-1000-vr-showrooms-in-dealerships-worldwide/