Car freaks visiting the Geneva car show last year gawked at an amphibious vehicle called Racoon. Dubbed the "freedom car of tomorrow," Racoon was constructed by French car-maker Renault. You could sit in the Racoon and take photos of its steel shell and twin turbocharged V-6 engine. But to take it for a ride, you'd need a pretty good workstation.
The Racoon has already established itself as a virtual performer at computer-image jamborees and on TV news. In 1993, Renault created a film of a Racoon bumping down a French country road and then swimming through the very wet water of a lake near Nimes, in the south of France. The film's clouds and sky were real enough – not to mention the picnickers sitting at water's edge – but the car was not. It was the stuff of design dreams, convincingly edited into a slice of real-life landscape.
Renault's foray into virtual engineering is an attempt to break through what Bruno Simon, one of Renault's top car designers, calls his occupation's paradox: "creating dynamic objects but having to work on static models to preserve industrial secrets." Since Renault can't test a new model under real conditions without the risk of leaking its designs to competitors, it has created a digital testbed for prototyping the aesthetics, road-holding, and drivability of new vehicles.
The first step is to build a database of virtual driving routes. Then designers mock up a complete virtual car with digitized features: weight, size, shock absorption, steering-lock coefficient, and tire profiles. Using a simulator program, the design team then drives the prototype through the database to find out how it behaves.
To wed performance to aesthetics, the computational model is translated into watchable film. Instead of using the unlifelike results of computer-generated driving environments, Renault now uses the Synthetic TV process, developed at the Institut National de l'Audiovisuel, to integrate the digital images into real filmed landscapes (as in that Racoon sequence first shown in 1993).
With computing clout poised to deliver real-time design results, virtual vehicle testing may be set to give the automobile community's "new model" an entirely different meaning.
For information on the company's virtual car, call Patrick Fournee at Renault's Industrial Design Department: +33 (1) 41 04 26 17, fax +33 (1) 41 04 23 23.
- Andrew Joscelyne
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