Volvo will be the last carmaker to take advantage of Epic Games’ Unreal Engine graphics skills. The Swedish carmaker has said it will partner with Fortnite creator to bring a “photorealistic display” to its next-generation electric vehicle.
The key to the Volvo / Epic partnership is the “human-machine interface” (HMI), which, in the context of vehicle ownership, is another way of describing how car owners interact with software. of your vehicle. Volvo says Epic will help build a platform on which the carmaker’s engineers can design software that improves the HMI while maintaining the safety levels at which Volvo has built much of its reputation.
“This technology gives us the ability to create sensitive, high-quality images with which we can play and overlay information, create realistic representations when needed, all that kind of stuff,” said Thomas Stovicek, head of user experience. of Volvo. Cars. “So it’s really about creating the next generation of HMI for our customers.”
Image: Volvo
Security will be a key aspect of the new partnership, Stovicek said. Over the years, the company has built its reputation on security and quirky designs, and today’s ad wants to underscore that. Ideally, Volvo wants to use the Unreal Engine to show what the vehicle’s external sensors, such as the camera, radar and soon the lidar, are seeing out of the car to drivers without being “overwhelming,” he said, and He added: “It can be difficult to process.”
Other pieces of information, such as navigation and battery life, as well as the presentation of this information, such as light, color, and moving graphics, will be improved by working with Epic Gamers. said Stovicek.
Unreal Engine is Epic’s flagship tool for creating realistic 3D graphics, first shown in the 1998 Unreal first-person shooter. It has since been used in a variety of game genres and has been adopted by other industries, especially the film and television industry.
The automotive industry is a particularly attractive target for Epic Games, especially because cars are easier to represent realistically than humans. (It also talks about the popularity and proliferation of racing games.) More recently, Epic said it would work with GMC to supply HMI software for the 2022 Hummer EV pickup truck.
Image: Volvo
But Epic has become increasingly interested in the automotive industry. The logic is simple: modern cars are designed primarily with software and carry numerous computers on board that rely on touch screens and digital interfaces to power information centers. And Unreal Engine is a great platform for creating software, so why not put that software in cars?
“It was very appealing with the new hardware coming to cars, thinking of the car as an additional platform that we should recognize,” said Heiko Wenczel, head of Detroit’s Epic Games lab, from a perspective of HMI, from a point of view, from what the capabilities of the game can really contribute to the user experiences inside the car. “
Neither Volvo nor Epic would say which vehicles will be the first to have the software provided by Unreal Engine or what kind of timeline customers should expect to see these features implemented in Volvo’s wider fleet.
Volvo said it plans to sell 600,000 electric vehicles by the middle of the decade and will build a battery-powered facility in Europe by 2026. The company has said it is working with Swedish partner Northvolt on a new generation of batteries. batteries with a higher energy density designed to be integrated as a structural element of the vehicle. The new batteries, scheduled for after 2025, will allow for longer driving range between charges (up to 625 miles (1,006 kilometers)) and much faster charging times.
Volvo is also incorporating internal software development as a way to help speed up the deployment of new updates to the company’s fleet or fix system errors. The new operating system, which will be called VolvoCars.OS, will power the company’s next generation of electric vehicles and allow unsupervised driving on the roads.
Image: Volvo
The new operating system will act as an “umbrella system” for all underlying systems operating within the vehicle, including Android Automotive OS, Blackberry QNX, Linux, and AUTOSAR. The company said its new architecture will feature a basic computer consisting of two systems on a chip provided by Nvidia. Initially, one will focus on basic driving functions and the other on semi-autonomous and more advanced functions. In the future, Volvo hopes to synthesize the two computers into a single system for more efficient processing.
Ultimately, Volvo wants the help of Epic Games to modernize its next-generation vehicles, while acknowledging that the inflation of features is a real problem. Of course, much sharper renderings, richer colors, and new 3D animations will be included. But anything that distracts the driver will not be part of the package.
“There’s nothing off the table for us,” Stovicek said. “But of course, what’s important to us is that we put it in at the right time and make sure we have a safe driving experience and we’re not distracting the driver in the wrong way.”