Behind the scenes at Honda’s VR studio and its "Google Built-In" experience.
/ Honda started using VR in car design in 2017, which came in handy once coronavirus made collaborating in person impossible.Honda
After March 2020, every automaker on the planet had to rethink how it leveraged technology. Everything from design and engineering to key partnerships needed to be rethought to keep businesses running. While Honda may not be the automaker you think of as pushing the automotive tech envelope, its long-time presence in Silicon Valley and its forward-thinking made it relatively early to the advanced tech design game when the pandemic hit.
To that end, Honda’s been using virtual reality design systems, and its long-time relationship with Google, to bring better products to Honda customers. We got an exclusive peek inside the VR studio and a brief look at Honda’s new “Google Built-In” experience coming on the 2023 Honda Accord, and perhaps a few hints at what could be coming for Honda owners and drivers alike.
Inside the Honda VR studio and a virtual Honda Prologue EV
Honda has built a completely digital design studio that helps designers and engineers on opposite sides of the world to collaborate on future designs, including one of Honda’s first consumer battery-electric vehicles.
“For the Honda Prologue, our first fully electric SUV that’s coming in 2024, we were ready. We had everything in place, the team was ready and trained, and skilled. And we’re able to fully utilize VR as a data-led design process and use clay only as a verification tool,” Mathieu Geslin, principal engineer and the VR tech leader at Honda, said. The Prologue was designed completely in VR.
/ The VR system and headsets are far more robust (and much heavier) than those you can buy off the shelf for home use. When we asked Honda about the manufacturer, they said that it was a system that’s only available for commercial use but wouldn’t elaborate on the details since many are proprietary.
A large, relatively open room is divided into nine different studio areas by scaffolding which holds the VR wires and special drapes that divide each space. In two of the spaces, there are two bare-bones interior bucks. Sit in one, strap on a massive VR headset like the one below, and you can see the details of the interior of the new Prologue in blended reality. Outside the virtual vehicle, you can see one of the buildings on the Honda campus. Look inside, and the dials, knobs, screens, and center console look real enough to reach out and touch, though this simulation is just for looking, not for touching.
In the second buck, Honda’s engineers are working to integrate a more seamless augmented reality. Here an engineer or designer can sit, strap on another VR headset, and see their hands and others in the curtained-off area. While the experience is still a bit glitchy, the headset utilizes tools like lidar to read external information and integrate it into VR. Geslin said that engineers were still tweaking the algorithms to make things like your hands look less like digital representations with missing pixels at the edges.
In another section, Honda showed off some of the same VR tools it uses to allow virtual collaboration on the exterior and interior bits of the design. Stand at the center of a padded circle, and put on the VR headset. Grab a VR hand controller and use the fishing line that appears to move your perspective around the outside of the vehicle. You can even virtually pass your head through the side of the car to get a closer look at the back seat view or the cargo area.
/ Mathieu Geslin (in the foreground) collaborates with a colleague in VR.Honda
“With our technology and the skills we’ve built up since 2017, we can build any scenic environment in CG to evaluate models based on many variables,” Geslin said. “This allows the designers and engineers to see the models in specific environments, such as a scenic plate, or our physical courtyards that we have in both of our studios, that we use to hold traditional evaluations.”
Keyword: Here’s how Honda’s next electric SUV was designed during the pandemic