The writing was arguably already on the wall for the traditional car show. Even before Covid-19, manufacturers were increasingly shunning shows in favor of hosting their own launch events. Booking a stand at Geneva (or Frankfurt, or Paris or Los Angeles) had become too expensive – and in any case, why share the press day’s headlines with your rivals, when you can have them all to yourself a few weeks or months later?
Meanwhile ZeroLight, a 3D visualization company based in Newcastle, northeast England, saw an opportunity. Having already worked with brands like Audi, BMW, Porsche and Lamborghini, creating lifelike, interactive and infinitely customizable 3D renderings of vehicles, all based in the cloud, ZeroLight was well-placed to fill the void left by Geneva.
“The current crisis is going to drive a permanent shift in behavior,” says Simon Robinson, who recently joined the board of ZeroLight, having previously co-founded Oscar-winning visual effects company, The Foundary. “[The pandemic] is making something happen in a very short cycle that possibly would have taken at least another couple of years to get to.”
With humans unable to gather en masse for months to come, the traditional in-person car show (and brand-specific launch events) simply can’t happen. Companies are now scrambling to head online, with live video streams of launches in remote locations, pre-recorded reveals, and even virtually reality presentations beamed to journalists’ homes.
This is where ZeroLight and its ability to create life-like 3D renders of vehicles, streamed from the cloud, comes into its own. “With the rise of the coronavirus and the social distancing, we saw all the trends, which are the driving force of what we do, accelerating,” says Francois de Bodinat, chief product officer at ZeroLight. “We saw a lot of OEMs coming to us and saying ‘hey guys, can you help us, because we’re in trouble. We’ve lost the connection between us and our customers’.”
To fix this, ZeroLight launched Re:Connect, a package of three cloud-powered visualization solutions to help get car makers and dealerships back on their feet, both during and after the coronavirus pandemic. Called Reveal, Concierge and Display, the three elements use lifelike 3D modelling of vehicles to launch a car without a motor show (including the creation of press images without a photoshoot), then remotely establish a connection between dealerships and customers, and share a dealer’s current vehicle stock, online, in the most realistic way possible.
Instead of a small set of poorly-taken photos, dealerships can use ZeroLight’s tools to build an exact 3D replica of each car in stock, ready for customers to inspect online in great detail.
De Bodinat continues: “Every OEM has a website where you can configure the car [but] they are very low resolution and limited, they can’t do all configurations and are definitely not interactive. What really accelerated ZeroLight was when we partnered with Amazon Web Services and took our dealership technology to the cloud, therefore to every single user at home or on their mobile, with our streaming and 3D interactive technology.
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