The fourth largest automaker of the world, Ford Motor Company, has served the automobile industry for almost 100 years now. And how it has lived up to the expectations of its customers can be well seen with the efforts the manufacturer puts in to design its cars. As recently revealed on the web, the American multinational uses virtual engineering to design vehicles for a more relaxed and comfortable driving.

A virtual engineering environment provides a user-centered, first-person perspective that enables users to interact with an engineered system naturally and provides users with a wide range of accessible tools. Using the similar motion capture technology movies like the very recent “Avatar” or the others like “Lord Of Rings” and many 3 D games have so far fascinated the audiences. Ford too uses the same technology to create realistic digital humans that engineers use to test vehicles in the virtual world.

“Just like in the movies, we hook people up with sensors to understand exactly how they move when they are interacting with their vehicles,” said Gary Strumolo, manager, Ford research and engineering. “Once we have all that motion captured, we create virtual humans that we can use to run thousands of tests that help us understand how people of all sizes and shapes interact with all kinds of vehicle designs. It’s an incredibly efficient way of engineering tomorrow’s vehicles.”

It is worthy to note that Ford is the only motor manufacturer to use such sophisticated technology to design the vehicles. The two notable areas are that of capturing motion in movies and cars while the other for creating holistic experience. The former uses the system called Human Package Simulator ( HOPS) which combines motion capture software with a test vehicle to measure and evaluate the body motion.

“Before HOPS, the only way to evaluate a given design was to have people get into a vehicle and tell us how they liked it,” Wang continued. “This took lots of time and guesswork. Now we can couple this subjective appraisal with objective measurements of their arms, legs and head movements, along with muscular efforts to quantify movement mathematically. Our design teams use the data as a guide for developing a variety of vehicle platforms that provide optimal comfort, regardless of a person’s size or shape.”

Thinking beyond, Ford uses two specialized tools, the Cave Automated Virtual Environment (CAVE) and the Programmable Vehicle Model (PVM) to understand the  situations that occur during real life driving.

“This technology enables us to evaluate many vehicle exterior and interior alternatives in a virtual environment from any location – in the driver’s seat or hundreds of feet away from the vehicle – with animated characters and vehicles,” said Elizabeth Baron, a technical specialist in Virtual Reality and Advanced Visualization at Ford.

The concept had so far been only used in animated and science fiction movies and 3-D games. Actually deploying such technology to enhance the design and engineering of the vehicles, Ford has well portrayed its safe and customer satisfaction oriented approach for a better market penetration and stabilization.

Source: Ford.com