GM Uses This 24-Foot 3-D Screen to Eyeball Photorealistic Prototypes

GM

Developing a new car is a time-consuming process. Designers and engineers and executives can spend months or years hashing out the look of a car, crafting renderings and models and prototypes to get the styling just right.

To speed things along, GM has built a 24-foot screen called the PowerWall. The screen, hidden deep within the company’s Vehicle Engineering Center in Warren, Michigan, is used to show execs and design teams life-size photorealistic renderings of vehicles. The screen works in 2-D or 3-D, though viewing the next Caddy in three dimensions requires donning those weird glasses.

It allows executives and designers to examine cars throughout the development process and make changes quickly and easily, without the need to craft full-size clay models for each design. Individual parts like headlight assemblies or mirrors can be moved around within the rendering, so executives can make decisions over what level of precision is necessary during the assembling process.

We got to see the cool seventh-gen Corvette in a variety of settings, including cruising the city, roaring through the countryside and on a blank backdrop. Designers can show what the car will look like with different paint schemes, with various cloth and leather interiors, in sunlight or at night, and much more. Lighting is photorealistic and, because the screen is so large, viewers can stand near the glass and nearly “walk around” the car as if it were right there in front of them.

The PowerWall has a resolution of 5879×2160, double the vertical resolution of a standard HDTV, and three times the horizontal. It has 50 percent more horizontal pixels than even the newest 4K sets. It’s powered by a pair of gigantic Christie Digital Systems “Mirage 4K25” DLP projectors. The projectors are carefully calibrated so they overlap pixel for pixel, with the middle-third of the screen actually two overlapping images.

The wall is powered by 16 clustered PC’s, with one master PC to control the cluster. The graphics output from each machine is stitched together by a pair of Vista Systems Spyder X20 video processing machines, all completely invisible to users.

The PowerWall received a full revamp earlier this year, with higher resolution projectors and faster computers. And yes, you can watch movies on it. Or, so we’re told. GM brass wouldn’t let us queue one up.