Car configurators
We meet the folk who make them
Tucked away in a small business studio in countryside six miles from Blackpool is probably the biggest car maker you’ve never heard of. You’ll look in vain for an army of assembly workers, though. You see, the people who put the cars together are not here – they’re you and me; people in homes all over the UK, sitting at their computers using an online configurator to choose colours and trims, and build their dream motor.
Real Time UK, this small business in the Lancashire village of Westby, is where the online configurators used by Bentley and Volkswagen are designed and produced. Every component they show, be it a Continental’s Tamo Ash over Piano Black single-finish veneer or a Golf’s optional 17in Karlskoga alloy wheels, starts life as a line of code, the same code the factories in Crewe and Wolfsburguse.eachcodegeneratesaflat,twodimensional image of a part or even an entire car. Real Time’s expert designers bring these thousands of unexciting and functional images to life by applying light, shade, perspective and texture in a series of layers. The result is images of cars and components you’d swear were real.
Once upon a time, all a new-car customer had to go by was a brochure, an options list and their own imagination. Now, they can amuse themselves speccing their chosen car on a configurator and see it evolve before their eyes in high resolution and perfect detail on their computer or smartphone.
Bentley reckons its customers typically spend eight minutes configuring their new car. Given there are up to seven billion permutations of options such as paint, hide, veneer and stitching possible on a GT alone, it’s surprising they don’t spend longer. The GT’S configurator requires 162,000 images to render these combinations of trim, more images than were created for the original Toy Story movie. If they were played one after the other, you’d be sitting at your computer watching them for five hours.
Play the Mulsanne’s 820,000 images (that model is a lot more configurable than the GT), and you’d be there for 9 hours 20 minutes. That being so, it’s good to know that, if a lot more of us were to come into Mulsanne money, Bentley’s server can support more than 14,000 simultaneous configurations.
Upstairs at Real Time UK’S smart barn offices is where the heavy lifting is done. It’s here that a team of talented, tech-savvy petrolheads sit, rendering the many layers required to form a configurator visualisation in glorious detail. Their Bentley jewel headlight lens is a thing of beauty. Where brake calipers are a different colour, they reproduce a corresponding tint on the alloy wheel.
The images you see on Real Time UK’S
The Bentley GT’S configurator requires 162,000 images to render all the options
Bentley and VW online configurators are in 2D but downstairs at the company’s Westby office (it has another site in Manchester), they’re putting the finishing touches to a 3D virtual reality configurator that uses all the layers and visualisations it creates.
The day I visit, the embargo on the new VW T-roc has just been lifted so it’s this car I’m invited to poke around in. I put on a VR headset and grasp a hand controller. Pressing a button on this generates a blue arrow ahead of me and a circle where, when I release it, a virtual T-roc suddenly appears. I can walk around it or inside it, whatever I wish. To move inside I can just walk through the car’s body or open a door. Everything is rendered in perfect, 3D detail. It really is as if a T-roc were standing in this small room for real.
On a future version, if you want to check the load volume of the boot, you’ll be able to pack it with virtual luggage. It’ll have haptic functionality, too, so you can operate some of the vehicle’s switchgear, effectively seeing what happens if you press a particular button or move a stalk. There’s more: if the VR experience has the car moving and the road’s bumpy, then in the future it will be possible to wear something that provides the appropriate sensations from the road surface, to support the feeling of motion.
Not surprisingly, Tony Prosser, the founder and managing director of Real Time UK, is excited about the potential of VR: “With this portable technology, dealers will no longer be tied to their showrooms, while customers will be able to see and experience their chosen car down to the last detail without having to imagine what it might be like.”
It’s appropriate that this man who makes the invisible visible is himself something of a visionary. As a student at Blackpool Art College in the early 1990s studying technical illustration, he noticed how 2D software was developing into 3D, and then into 3D animation, making movies such as Pixar’s Toy Story possible.
“I could see the way things were moving and I wanted to be a part of it,” he says. “But I could see car makers didn’t know what to do with the technology so in 1996, I started Real Time UK to develop it and show them. Now we have two offices and 34 staff, and we’re still growing.”
One of Prosser’s proudest achievements is being involved with Bentley’s Look Closer project which, using a gigapixel image, allows you to zoom into the Bentley logo stitched on the passenger seat of a Mulsanne from about half a mile out.
But that’s just a bit of fun. Upstairs at the Westby office they’re engaged on the serious business of making car-building possible for you and me. Perhaps when autonomous vehicles are a reality and we’re free to relax in cars, configurators will need to render more interesting options. I can already feel the baize on that snooker table.