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Volvo Cars is bringing photorealistic visualisation technology into its next generation of electric cars through a new collaboration with Epic Games. The companies are teaming up to bring Epic’s Unreal Engine game engine which provides high-quality graphics to the cabin of upcoming Volvo cars.
Epic Games is a leading interactive entertainment and software company probably best known for Fortnite, one of the world’s largest games.
Epic Games also develops Unreal Engine, an advanced real-time 3D creation tool which will now be used by Volvo Cars for developing digital interfaces inside its cars and rendering real-time graphics in the car.
Volvo Cars is the first European carmaker to use the Unreal Engine for development of the Human Machine Interface (HMI).
In the next generation of Volvo cars, customers will encounter impressive, high-quality graphics on those displays.
Much sharper renderings, richer colours and brand new 3D animations are only the first steps as Volvo Cars developers continue to push the graphic technology.
The first car to contain the new graphics is the new, all-electric flagship model that Volvo Cars will reveal later this year.
Henrik Green, chief product officer at Volvo Cars, says: “To offer our customers the best possible user experience and contribute to a safe and personal drive, we need rich, immersive and responsive visualisation inside our cars. Running Unreal Engine in our cars enables this and makes it even more enjoyable to spend time inside a Volvo.”
“When you bring interactive, high-resolution graphics running in real-time into the car, you open the door to a vast range of new ways to inform and entertain everyone inside,” adds Heiko Wenczel, Epic Games’ Director of Automotive and HMI for Unreal Engine. “Volvo Cars’ deeply talented design and product development teams have grasped this opportunity to do something fresh that will keep evolving with exciting new features that take advantage of the capabilities of Unreal Engine.”
Volvo Cars has an ambition to develop half of all the software inside its cars in-house by mid-decade and is recruiting extensively within software development.