Design tools and technologies—from the desk to the CAVE

Advanced design, as practiced today, involves an interplay of traditional and digital work techniques. Frequently, designers first make freehand sketches on paper in the conventional way and then convert them to digital form with a scanner. Others work in the digital medium from the very start and draw on a special touchscreen with an electronic stylus. On the basis of the 2D digital drawings, special software can be used to generate three-dimensional models of the vehicle being designed. Using special 3D printers, these models can be "printed out" in synthetic resin, for example, or the data can be used to control a computerized milling cutter that fashions the whole model or individual components out of clay. Fully digitized cars can also be animated in videos and inserted into realistic scenes – such as urban traffic or a waterside promenade.

New design tools are likely to appear in the near future. The trendsetters for this development are not infrequently found among the special effects gurus of the film industry in Hollywood and the high-tech inventors in Silicon Valley. "The palette of tools that we'll work with in the future will change," predicts Gorden Wagener, Vice President Global Advanced Design at Daimler. "But presumably that will happen in smaller steps than in the past two decades, when a current PC became as powerful as a supercomputer was ten years ago."

In the 1990s Daimler invested massive amounts in digital tools and high-performance computers in order to be at the cutting edge in design innovations. These days, the standard equipment includes programs like Alias, or equipment like laser scanners and even 3D printers, with which the prototype of a car component can be made overnight as if by magic.

Although the next leap in technology toward universal computerization has not yet been made, the tools for it and the direction of the overall trend are already beginning to emerge. Designers will be able to use new visualization techniques by means of virtual reality (VR). With VR, a component or even an entire car that exists only as a set of data can be built up before the designer's eyes as an all but tangible reality. A special cubical structure with one open face and five rear projection surfaces – known as the CAVE – serves as a virtual workshop where the designers, equipped with stereo glasses and a space mouse, can walk around a virtual car as though it were standing in the middle of the room.

"Designers of tomorrow will see new cars standing in front of them as high-resolution holograms," predicts Ben Dimson, designer and deputy studio manager in Irvine. Perhaps his successors will one day shape a model that exists only in the computer using special data gloves, much the way they now give a real clay model the final touch-ups with a putty knife, scraper and adhesive tape. "That's still a dream," says Dimson, "but I'm fairly sure it will happen."