Jaguar Land Rover’s innovative new Virtual Reality Centre opens

Jaguar Land Rover’s UK Design and Engineering Centre home in Oxfordshire this week saw the unveiling of a new £2 million wing that’s set to accommodate the car manufacturer’s sci-fi Virtual Reality Centre.

JLR has decided to keep its future product development plans very much ‘in-house’, and now has the means to sidestep traditional time-consuming sketching, chiseling and mocking up of life-size cardboard and/or cedar wood cut-outs.

So JLR bids goodbye to wood pulp, and says hello to 3-D glasses, as it now looks forward to virtually creating something designers and engineers can not only see before their eyes but interact with too. Life-size three-dimensional models of both vehicles and components that rid its world of physical prototypes that cost crucial time and money to construct.

JLR’s Virtual Reality Centre is said to be the most advanced of its type to be found anywhere on the planet, and utilises state-of-the-art projection technologies to interpret employee visions into something neither concrete nor wooden courtesy of beams of light and VR Walls.

Advanced virtual reality software traces the kinetics of the users head and hand movements to actually place the would-be driver into the potential vehicles space, where they can also acknowledge their form’s relationship with the cars exterior and interior. Simultaneously the bodywork is perceived as being of a solid constitution or transparent as required, with the resolution extolling near photo-realistic virtues.

This photo-realistic aspect has a resolution that’s four times greater in a vivid sensory than a domestic high definition TV, that’s brought to an amazing Technicolor life by eight mega-watt Sony projectors that are powerful enough to shape and deliver the worlds highest resolution images.

Brian Waterfield, JLR Principal Engineer and Virtual Reality Centre Manager said: "Jaguar Land Rover has taken another giant step forward in its thrust for technological advancement; enhancing its design and engineering process to enable quicker, more robust decision making. This facility offers a different level of engineering, one that will help future our products to meet the demand of an ever changing market place."

Someone who certainly needs to wear shades as the future's so bright, is Ratan Tata, JLR’s new gaffer and as such, the man who’s charged with plotting both brands’ future automotive co-ordinates from this unique facility.