Nissan is gearing up for a whole host of new concept cars for the upcoming Japan Mobility Show (neé Tokyo motor show) and the striking Hyper-Urban concept (more on which HERE) is just the first.
Futuristic studio
To design a whole bunch of futuristic new cars, you'll need a design studio to match, and so in a pleasing coincidence, Nissan has one of those too, and has shown us briefly behind the scenes.
The new design presentation hall is based in Atsugi, Kanagawa Prefecture in Japan, and features a massive ultra-wide 24K curved screen, full-colour ceiling screen, remote lighting, and 7.1-channel sound to, according to Nissan: "Create an immersive experience that more realistically replicates real-world customer use, creating new value by fusing the physical and digital."
It's actually very much like the incredibly high-def digital 'volume' stages used for the most recent Star Wars films and TV shows - a huge screen that can create photo-real backgrounds and settings in front of which the actors can perform. Where Nissan is concerned, you just replace Darth Vader with a new concept car.
Cuts the time spent in design
It's not just so that Nissan designers can play Star Wars on their coffee breaks (although we bet they do...). It's also a way of cutting down the time a new car spends in the design process. A shorter design process means that a car comes to market that much more quickly, which is both a cost saving and - potentially - a booster for revenue. Win-win, really.
Nissan says that 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." It means that a car's styling can be checked out under realistic recreations of real weather and light to ensure that what looks good in the studio doesn't turn out to be dull and uninteresting on a wet day in Wexford, so to speak.
Boundary between real and digital
"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" said a Nissan spokesperson, who also pointed out that this is part of a process that started five years ago when Nissan first began to use virtual reality in its design studios.
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 'theatre' 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."