[APPLAUSE]
>> Hello, and a very warm welcome from BMW, and also
from Mackevision.
Over here, we have my amazing colleague, Harald Hechler,
who is the Product Owner from the IT side
for the project called EVE.
And Christopher.
Christopher is our Lead Developer for the project EVE.
And I'm Marcel, the Product Owner from the business side.
And now we have heard EVE a couple of times,
but we still don't know what it is, right?
So how about we have a look where EVE is at home--
a BMW dealership.
Here you can see a normal BMW dealership
is quite open and inviting.
So we pop on in, and we can see that our CI
architecture features some futuristic and also
innovative elements.
Same goes for where we are actually selling the cars--
the sales advisor's desk.
And there you can see at every sales advisor's desk
we have a screen, which is connected
to a high-performance rendering machine.
This machine has already been introduced by the BMW Group
in the year of 2012.
So what does that mean?
We faced some challenges with it.
We have the year 2019.
So that means that the visual quality that we
had before the project called EVE was OK,
but it had not been on the standard from today.
At the same time, when we introduced the rendering
machines, we only had one front end
to work with these machines.
And back in the day, we were hoping that our dealerships
were buying as many--
and the only front end was an iPad.
So we were hoping that the dealerships were
buying as many iPads as they have bought the rendering
machines.
But we're all friends.
Let's face it-- the reality was, they did not.
So this meant that sometimes we had machines standing
in our dealerships who actually cost
money that were not being used.
So we thought already in 2019 and '18,
and we started working on the project
this year, that we need to change that.
We need to work, or we want to try, to push the boundaries.
We want to rise to the next level in terms
of the visual quality.
At the same time, we want to work
on the speed and performance.
So as an example, if a customer wants to see a 3 Series,
but then decides, well, I just go for the 7 Series,
this needs to happen in a couple of seconds.
And we want to have front end independency,
meaning it just shouldn't matter if a customer or a sales
advisor comes into our dealerships
with an iPhone or Android phone or an iPad or the sales
advisor's laptop.
Everyone should always be able to connect to these rendering
machines.
And, lucky for us, but at the same time quite the challenge,
we do have several thousand of these machines
out in over 60 markets.
So we started developing this new software
in January of this year.
And right from the beginning, we had our customers and also
the people that are working with these machines in mind.
So once again, we wanted to achieve
mind-blowing visual quality.
The connection needs to be as easy as possible.
We don't want to have any waiting time switching
from one model to the other.
And, very important, we want to add more sales use cases.
Not only focusing anymore on the new car sales,
but also on the used cars and stock cars.
And something very important that we also had in
mind the whole time--
we didn't want to have any additional investment
for the dealers, meaning new software but no new hardware.
It's quite challenging, but we achieved that.
That's why please say hello to EVE.
EVE it's the Emotional Virtual Experience.
So, how does it look like?
Well, why don't we ask her to render the new 1 Series.
There you can see the car from the interior view.
Also, when we introduced EVE, we came up
with five different environments.
The environments ranged from Hong Kong to Cape Town,
or the delivery zone in the BMW Welt here in Munich.
One thing that was very important
for us is the interaction with our cars for the user,
meaning we also introduced interactive elements, which you
can see in a couple of seconds.
Meaning open the door, open the trunk,
or whatever you want to do with the cars.
And with that, I'll hand over to Harald.
>> OK, thank you, Marcel.
So I will give you some impressions directly
out of EVE.
There is a nice shot of the 8 Series Gran Coupe.
I'm not sure whether I like more the car
or this beautiful rendering.
The environment is through BMW World here in Munich.
And you can just see the reflection here.
It's the BMW headquarter, our four-cylinder.
I like it, really.
And just a quick look to the front of the 8 Series Gran
Coupe.
It's night surrounding, and we turn generally
on the lighting of the vehicle to visualize to our customers
iconics, like our headlights.
I think it's nice.
And I'm also a great fan of our interior visualization,
especially our outer visualization, the villa
surrounding, with impressive sunlight and nice shadow
conditions.
If you configure later on the booth,
for example, a panorama sun roof,
you will see directly what will change in the interior.
And you can buy it directly here.
No, just kidding.
This is still work in progress, but it's a good story point
to tell an impression how we will give our customers more
experience with their configuration.
We do not move the car by hand or rotate it.
The goal is that the vehicle would be
shown as in natural behavior.
It drives.
And we can show it at day and at night,
and it can be to be shown from customer viewpoint
or from predefined artist setups upfront.
The EVE content.
That's just vehicles.
No guns, no armors, no first aid kits like in games.
Just the 52 different vehicles we
have inside the complete BMW, BMW i, and Mini lineup.
And inside of Eve, that's our 150-person models.
That means all possible worldwide combinations
are included in the data.
The European variants-- sorry, and other UK,
with right-handed versions.
I think they are still in Europe, the Union.
US, Japan, China, and with miles and kilometers,
special reflectors in some markets,
and all possible options a customer can choose.
Millions of variants.
The visualization of the vehicle is
controlled by our front ends, which
only send the configuration string with all needed
information to the configuration.
And this is the base idea of Eve.
Eve is designed as a service and experience
platform for the customer.
Controlled by customer front ends or dealer front end.
At the end, it doesn't matter who controls EVE.
And really, I don't know where the platform
is running in the future--
under the desk of the sales guy, or in the cloud.
I don't know.
Everything can happen.
We integrate the sales tools with a unified API
because we are a little bit lazy.
We don't want to test several front ends of every market.
We just test our front ends in one version,
and that it fits to all.
Its based on the Python server.
So the benefit is that it's easy to implement,
and the connection handling is also easy.
The control layer is separated from the Unreal Engine.
Oh, we can exchange it.
[CHUCKLES] No, that's not the goal.
The next slide, a little bit of introduction.
It shows our VR solution.
Made this movie together with Epic during the Oktoberfest
here in Munich by the dealer called Automach.
The problem was, on dealer side, there
was no staff to help us by the video, by the shooting.
So I called Marcel directly from the Oktoberfest.
He's our weapon in front of the camera here.
And he plays the salesperson.
But he comes directly from the Oktoberfest.
Here we will see it.
The customer is played by Philip.
>> I was not drunk.
[CHUCKLES] He's somewhere in the audience.
He was just there to install the hardware.
But now he is the customer.
>> Yes.
>> Yeah.
That's a classical story, that the customer
is interested in a vehicle, but his dream configuration
isn't there at the dealership.
So you can go with the customer to our BMW or Mini
virtual reality cube, and the customer
can sit in his dream car after he's set up a goggle,
and make changes of different things.
He just dives into his virtual car and can look around.
He can jump outside.
He can make changes, if he would like to.
And he can open the trunk and play around with his dream car.
He is always assisted by the professional sales guy,
and he can make his decision completely without hardware.
And now I hand over to Christopher
from Mackevision, who will show more details to the data
pipeline, the VR approach, and a little insight
of our worldwide deployment.
>> Yes, thank you.
All right.
[APPLAUSE]
So as we just saw, the BMW and Mini feed
consists of a lot of models, and I'd
like to talk about how we brought this
all into the Unreal Engine.
For every model series, we started off
with a DeltaGen scene that was exported to a Maya scene.
And from here on out, we automated everything.
So we have a converter tool that reduces
the complexity of the scene and then
exports it is a few thousand FBX files and metadata.
And then we used Unreal's Python feature
to build an import process that imports all these files,
applies some settings to the meshes,
like translucency sort and shadows and so on, that
parses the metadata again and the DeltaGen
files to create animations.
And finally, it recreates the whole scene as an Unreal map.
And all that is working with just one
click per model series.
And that's made our lives a lot easier because--
I said we have 52 models.
And one model series consists of about 34,000 DeltaGen nodes,
and still 20,000 nodes after optimization, 12,000 geometry
files, 400 materials, 200 textures.
And we have to import this at least three times a year
per model.
And even importing a single model
would have been impossible to do by hand
because you can't modify thousands of files manually.
And for VR mode, you can see the same detail there
because we could use all the models without optimizing them
any further.
So to start VR mode, you are just
running the normal application.
And you will pick up your head-mounted display,
and then you can start.
And moreover, the VR UI uses the same end points
as all the other front ends.
So the user has the same possibilities available to him,
and we could use the same Python back end.
And it all plays very neatly and conveniently together.
[CELL PHONE RINGS]
Please turn it off.
[LAUGHTER]
And finally, to roll out EVE and the whole model range,
and to monitor the systems and use it,
our partner [INAUDIBLE] developed a new back end
service and update service.
And thanks to the prior installed solution,
there was a really smooth takeover in the beginning.
And now we can deploy application and content
individually.
And often Delta updates just require a few kilobytes
or megabytes.
But even so, we've already had 325 terabytes of data transfer
volume globally.
And in one night, we updated 4,000 systems
using the service.
Last but not least, it enables us
to manage all machines individually or in clusters,
and to test and deploy all packages in the right versions.
>> Yeah, and with that, thank you very much for your attention.
And see you at the BMW booth over there.
[APPLAUSE]
Thanks so much.