Cross-industry partnerships are commonplace in the auto industry, especially these days with technology playing such a key role in shaping the business towards the future. McLaren considers itself as one of the automakers leading this charge and that became more apparent at the 2016 Game Developers Conference when it announced a partnership with Epic Games. McLaren will use Unreal Engine 4 software to help design its models.
For those who don’t know, Unreal Engine 4 is the latest version of the Unreal Engine game development tool. The tool is the most successful video game engine ever, as cited by no less than the Guinness Book of World Records. While it’s core function remains in the industry of video games, the technology has since branched out and has been licensed in other industries, including education, training and construction simulations, virtual reality, CG animation, and with the announcement of this partnership with McLaren, the auto industry.
McLaren design manager Mark Roberts spoke about the partnership at the conference, calling it a huge step for McLaren in creating “a range of new tools, new virtual tools in the visualization field.” Roberts also said that as part of the new collaboration, McLaren has already sent capture data from all of its cars to Epic, in addition to actual paint samples, material samples of the paint and fabric, and audio recordings of things like engine noise.
That’s part and parcel tied into the first product to come out of this new collaboration, which has been dubbed the “Customer Configurator.” Using this consumer facing tool, would-be buyers of McLaren cars can fully customize their cars similar to how sneakerheads do it through Nike’s ID editor. If you’ve seen how that works, it basically allows a customer to mix and match paint colors to see which one he likes. In the case of McLaren, that level of customization can extend all the way to the interior with the seat and surface materials, as well as trim and color options.
The objective of the configurator is to give prospective buyers the chance to essentially imprint their personalities into the car that they’d like to buy. It’s a new level of customization that Roberts said will “revolutionize” the way the British automaker designs its cars.
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