EMMA SCHRODER: Hello and welcome.
My name is Emma.
I'm responsible for the project management here at MHP and my team.
and I are very excited to share with you a short insight
into our Pagani Immersive Experience Platform project.
If you have the opportunity to experience the cars and the
company, you get an idea about the craftsmanship, the precision, and
also the passion that every single vehicle is built with.
The clients are not only configuring a car,
they are basically creating a very unique and
hyper-personalized piece of art.
This is an incredible, but also very emotional experience, which
was also one of our biggest challenges in this project.
Because every single vehicle is built exclusively for a customer,
the retailers don't have the physical cars available in the stores.
We had to develop a solution that is visually appealing,
photorealistic, and provides this immersive feel, all inside of an
Unreal Engine based application.
In our end to end approach, we created a visual creative
and technical concept together with the clients.
We also developed realistic 3D environments based on spheres
or photogrammetry, like the actual Pagani headquarter you can
experience in our engine.
This has also to be combined with a very intuitive, easy
and fun to use interface with many interactive features.
We've recreated high definition materials, like the very
special tinted exposed carbon fiber options by Pagani.
And after or during the configuration process, the clients can visualize
their configuration in driving experiences or other digital
giveaways that the retailers can provide to the clients afterwards.
And of course, we had to realize the rollout and operation
of our application on all dealer systems worldwide.
KIM WAGNER: Hi, I'm Kim and I'm part of the Unreal development
team here at MHP.
We put a lot of time and effort into creating this amazing
looking interactive point of sales application, but we
wanted to get more out of it.
And we wanted to use it for more than just a pure dealer experience.
Over the last years, especially with the addition of ray tracing, Unreal
basically achieved photorealism.
So our goal was to use the point of sales application as
it is to change the content,
be it static images or videos delivered on demand or pre-rendered.
We tried to break down our requirements for this.
We need a description of a scene, get our application into
the state and then render out an image, easy as that.
But different Unreal applications might use different input models,
different interfaces, or even use external microservices like rule engines.
We didn't want to spend much time on integration and adoption of
our tools for every application.
So we thought, what if you created a standalone plugin, with it's
completely separate communication interfaces and its own generic scene
description.
All the integration we would need is a small translation
there between this plugin and our native Unreal project.
Having a uniform platform enables us to develop and reuse our
rendering features in Unreal
independently of the application the plugin is integrated in.
That started as a rough idea on a
whiteboard, and it became what we call our Elastic Content Platform.
The goal was to make it seamlessly integrate into any existing
Unreal project and make all our custom rendering features
part of it.
We developed this idea in parallel with the Pagani application
and integrated it into it,
transforming a point of sales application into a
flexible rendering backend.
We use this internally to render out work in progress video sequences
to share with Pagani for feedback, but we also generate hundreds of
images for quality assurance purposes between application versions.
And this platform was also used in our Pagani streaming demo to
deliver screenshots to the user at home.
It's a lot of fun to develop new ideas and use cases around
this concept because every time we want to get an image out of
Unreal, it's easily possible.
PASCAL BAYER: Hi.
I am Pascal Bayer, application architect at MHP, and I'm responsible
for the service architecture of our Elastic Content Platform.
The idea behind our offering is a modular service platform that can
serve all of our customer's content needs from a single 3D pipeline.
Modularization is the key success factor in building a scalable
cloud native content platform.
The Unreal Engine is our core component for visualization.
On top, components like a retail configurator, a streaming
configurator, and image on demand generation can be added
as needed.
Within a few minutes,
each of these services can be scaled up and down automatically
based on the content demands to provide high availability, but
also keep costs under control.
This helped us to deliver a real-time ray tracing streaming configurator
for Pagani at the last GTC event
within a few weeks only.
The Unreal Engine perfectly fits into the
modular approach by connecting our broad range of APIs on the
one hand, but also exposing additional ones for interaction
with the content on the other.
Additionally, this allowed us to easily integrate existing systems in
the enterprise world like analytics or CRM.
That strong extensible and
open platform foundation is enabling our current efforts towards a
hyper-personalized content strategy in the future.
It will enable our customers to create a
more immersive experience.
And a deeper emotional connection with their brands by creating
content on demand for newsletters, landing pages, interactive ads,
digital giveaways, and so much more.
STEPHAN BAIER: So, as you already heard from Emma,.
Pascal, and Kim, Pagani offers the best possible digital
experience to their clients.
But we aimed to push the boundaries between digital and real
worlds even further by creating configurable automotive film for Pagani.
So we went for a three-day production and shooting at the
Imola Formula One race track in Italy.
The film which we produced
might look like a regular TV ad, but there's one big difference.
Like in the digital showroom, the cars and the film are
instantly customizable.
You can swap the model or color in and out as you watch, it's
completely personalizable.
To push the visuals as far as they can go
the rendering will accurately reproduce the real time lighting
from the filmed environment
using real time ray tracing from Unreal Engine.
The technology involved in the production provides us a glimpse of
the future of customer engagement and could play a unique role
in how we showcase personalized content and products in the future.
This is only possible with real-time technologies like
Unreal Engine, the experiences we are building and which we are
developing are more like games.
All of this was made possible by an Epic MegaGrant.
And we were really thankful to get this.
And the best part for the Unreal community,
and this is something which we are proud to announce today,
the Imola race track environment and the Pagani hypercar as it's used on
the project will be made available to download from the Unreal Marketplace
after today's Build event.
So thanks again for the event.
Thanks again to Epic Games for making this possible.
And thanks for having me.