Volvo Cars and Varjo launch world-first mixed reality application
Kolkata, 30 May (HS): The world famous Swedish cars Volvo and Varjo, the Finnish maker of high-end augmented reality headsets,have now created a world-first mixed reality approach to evaluating prototypes, designs and active safety technologies through collaborations.
This collaboration will be further strengthened by the Volvo Cars Tech Fund’s decision to invest in Varjo. The Tech Fund is the car maker’s venture capital fund which invests in high-potential technology start-ups, company sources here today informed.
According to them, Volvo cars and Varjo have made it possible for the first time to drive a real car while wearing a mixed reality headset, seamlessly adding virtual elements or complete features that seem real to both the driver and the car’s sensors, for development purposes.
Until now, no other car maker has been able to do this.
Compared to its predecessor, this new XR-1 would add high-definition cameras to the headset and enables mixed reality. This allows Volvo Cars designers and engineers to ‘drive’ future cars and evaluate all features in a simulation environment many years before they exist, enabling the company to develop the safest cars with the most refined user experience possible.
“With this mixed reality approach, we can start evaluating designs and technologies while they are literally still on the drawing board,” the sources quoting Henrik Green, chief technology officer at Volvo Cars said here.
“Instead of the usual static way of evaluating new products and ideas, we can test concepts on the road immediately, they said adding this approach offers considerable potential cost savings by identifying priorities and clearing bottlenecks much earlier in the design and development process, they added.
