>>Thomas: Ninety percent of all information
that goes into your brain is visual.
And therefore, it's very important
that you all are talking about what we are covering.
You need to know your customer journey.
Depending on the area where you first get in touch
with a customer, when he sees the product,
you need to show great content.
Seventy percent of marketing strategy experts
say you need to have great visuals
in order to convince a prospect to a customer.
What we see here is a content banner.
It's just one example.
It doesn't include all the assets,
but it shows the complexity.
We have more than 50 different models
with millions of configurations, updates,
at least two major ones a year,
minor ones on top, always in between.
We have different variations up to the markets,
and in the content banner,
the customer is facing different kinds of content,
static images, active images.
It's preproduced movies and, of course, interactive stuff.
The interactive stuff we showed you last year,
we serve to the retail,
and with this, we also try to dive deeper into this.
So let us assume you served this topic,
but you need to think beyond.
You need to go further. What you are going to need,
you need more content for more channels.
And therefore, you need to be more flexible.
And the future is going to be different than today.
You are going to have AI-driven recommendations.
You want to show personalized, location-based,
and device-specific content.
And the major factor for this is time to market,
and you can't run a proper off-land protection,
after briefing, brief the agency,
get the stuff back, do the QA, take care of other distribution.
You need to want to have it there instantly,
so as instant as possible. And therefore, in our mind,
the Unreal Engine 4 could be an option.
But before we talk about the future
and you take care of the future, you need to do your homework.
So what we showed you last year was the claim,
own the process, own the data and everyday experience.
You maybe remember.
So this is some of the results, what we did,
and the total model conversions for our 3 model years
for the entire globe life cycle came down from 160 to 50.
And I'm very proud about the team that we achieved this.
The major indicator was standardization
which enabled the automization.
This means per model conversion instead of 5 days, 0.5 days.
In a total, less than 100 days instead of 1,000 days.
And more information and details about tech stuff
is going to tell you Dominic.
>>Dominic: Thank you, Thomas.
So I will tell you some technical stuff
we did since last Build.
So what did we do since last Build?
We did no major visual improvements,
and we also did no fancy features.
What?
But we did actually a lot, a lot of things if you can tell.
Of course, we have a live system.
This means we have to do life cycle.
We did a bunch of bug
fixes, perfecting architectural changes,
life cycle for 211 cars,
3 more years available right now,
which is 57 cars in total. We improved the model pipeline.
It's more automated. It's supporting LINC standard.
We created the first Fascinator content,
offline content for the website.
We developed a cloud streaming system.
We restructured our whole perforce server.
We created a completely new CI/CD pipeline.
We developed an install/update system
and, of course, a lot of tools
which are just handy in our daily lives.
And of course a lot more, what I cannot tell you right now
but maybe next build.
I will talk about in detail about cloud streaming
and the install/update system. So first cloud streaming.
The general idea is to have the application run in the cloud
so the client is device independent.
He can have any device.
There is very many more requirements on the device,
and he just gets the same quality like
with the local workstation hardware at the dealerships.
This is a major benefit that you are device independent
and can scale much more.
And there are other benefits. I'll just click through.
I am running out of time. We talked to Epic
when we started our development 1 year ago.
And actually, they told us,
"Hey, guys, we have already developed something
or are in development for something,"
and it's called PixelStreaming. It wasn't public back then.
And we met with the Dev team from Epic
who did PixelStreaming,
and we were able to talk to them and give them our requirements.
And PixelStreaming has been a very, very smooth experience
for us the first time we got it.
It was more or less plug and play.
It was only bug, and it was fixed immediately.
So some facts about PixelStreaming.
It comes with the Engine.
It's a plugin you have to enable. It uses WebRTC.
It streams via h.264 video encoding.
It's super easy to set up.
It just works as soon as you have the necessary bandwidth
and some browser requirements,
but any up-to-date browser can handle that.
And we need two to five mbps for HD stream in high quality,
so no major compression artifacts.
Also, just to finish it up, in the exhibition hall,
you can experience the PixelStreaming live.
So we have a bunch of iPads with just the website.
You can take the iPad and try it out yourself.
PixelStreaming is an upcoming feature,
until now, we are still collaborating with Epic
and giving them our requirements,
what we think is beneficial for PixelStreaming,
and we have these things
which are upcoming soon and available soon.
The FreezeStream, this means you can pause the stream
to freeze the image to a certain quality,
and if the bandwidth of the user gets down,
he still has this image in his cache.
So you always have high quality then.
The compression was improved as well,
so it's much more reliable and much more high quality.
And it got a little bit easier because of the WebRTCProxy
component and throughout completely.
Next topic, install/update system.
So the basic idea here is to have a flexible update system
which has small data update sizes.
Our application has 40GB of disk space,
and the dealerships can have quite low bandwidth.
So we do not want to download the 40GB of application
all the time or big chunks of it,
so we want to have the lowest possible update size.
And most of the time, there is only a small fix
like a material was wrong and just got fixed.
No need to download the whole car.
It's just one material.
We evaluated different systems in the market
and, again, talked to Epic.
And they told us there is BuildPatchServices already
for a long time. It comes with the Engine.
So compared to other features in the Engine,
there is really zero documentation.
Other stuff is documented very well, but this is not.
This is because it's used internally
by Epic in the Epic Games Launcher.
So we got told we are the second client to ever ask for it,
so that means something.
There is not a need of documentation right now.
And we believe that it's actually a piece of black magic,
and this is how it looks like. At least, it's black.
The magic, you have to find yourself.
So to generate an update,
there is a tool called BuildPatchTool services.
It's a BAT file or an EXE file.
You can launch with some parameters,
and this will create you a complete installation
repository, means you get a manifest,
which describes your composition,
and you get a folder.
These are cryptic files and only with the manifest,
you can recombine the chunks to one installation.
And to install this, you need to write your own installer,
but this has very quickly been done. It takes 1 or 2 days,
and you will have your own install system
to manage all of this.
So big shout-out to Lee. He helped us a lot.
He is from Epic and working on the system.
The system itself, BuildPatchServices, compensates
various scenarios very, very well.
It's super efficient and flexible.
So if you make only small changes,
it's only very small, and that would up its size.
If you rename a file,
it's 0 kilobytes of update size,
so it's amazing.
And even Engine updates, which is of course important for us
because we have a live system
and we want to have all the new features.
We need to do Engine updates regularly,
and so we need to cover that.
If you do an Engine update, every file changes.
But we have seen update sizes from 70 to 100 megabytes
if you change the Engine, so quite nice.
Yeah, we are very, very happy with BuildPatchServices.
It's a great tool. Yeah, and we are hiring,
so Unreal Engine developers, of course,
cloud engineers, product owners, scrum masters,
full stack developers, Java developers and much more,
so if you are interested in the stuff we do,
just get in touch with us.
We are an amazing team. Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]
So Thomas was talking about content farms earlier,
and of course we are evaluating,
what content demands can we create out of Unreal
right out of a dealership configurator?
Therefore, we started a couple of weeks ago a POC with Epic.
It's still in VIP state,
so we still need to do some polishing and stuff like that.
Yeah, but more to that, Florian will tell you right now.
[APPLAUSE]