It’s a fascinating commercial. Millions of points of light flicker on to represent two human bodies hovering above the ground. The figures are seated with their hands in front of them holding invisible steering wheels, their legs sticking forward to accelerate invisible cars. As they speed towards each other it quickly becomes clear that this is a crash test simulation.
One of the representations is made up of 119 points of light, the number of data points that can be collected from a standard crash test dummy. As it races to meet its fate it seems a hollow representation of a human, especially when contrasted with the second representation where the human form is clearly defined and even the internal skeleton is visible. The second representation is made of 2,000,000 points of light – the number of data points that can be gathered from a Lexus digital crash test dummy.
This new Lexus ad campaign, dubbed “Light,” launched in September. Now we take a deeper look into how digital design technology can advance the safety of us all.
The luxury auto-maker teamed up with motion capture effects firm Vicon House of Moves to capture the collision in their 2,520 square foot stage. Shooting at 240 frames per second, Vicon HOM captures every detail of the human body at the point of impact. “Our stages and capture volumes are big enough to facilitate a shoot that required a custom 40-foot rig to simulate a crash test scenario that exists in an automobile factory,” said Brian Rausch, Vice President of Production, Vicon House of Moves, in an interview posted on Dexigner.com.
Lexus has pioneered the use of this digital simulation technology to ensure that they are the industry-leaders in safety and to give engineers a better understanding of the human body upon impact. But they aren’t trying to keep such a beneficial technology to themselves. According to the Lexus website, over 20 other automobile companies have already licensed the technology. Now the race is to see what they can do with it.
The voiceover in the “Light” commercial sums it up: “When you pursue industry-leading safety, you don’t just engineer breakthroughs in simulation technology, you engineer amazing.” Both the “Light” campaign and the behind-the-story video are available on www.lexus.com/engineering_amazing/#.
Misleading commercial at the least from an engineering perspective. First, 119 points, I have no idea where you get that from, unless you are comparing to real life dummies and tests. There is no such dummy that exists with 2 million data points, except in SIMULATION, on a computer. If you are comparing a real life dummy test to a computer simulation that is apples and oranges.
Manufacturers have been running simulations of steadily increasing complexity since the 1990s; as a record of fact and history, GM was the first to develop the H-3 dummy under Harold “bud” Mertz, with all safety regs being developed as a result. Lexus is simply a follower like all the rest. Simulations returning terabytes of data (millions of data points) were being run int the late 1990s on Cray supercomputers at the Warren Technical Center.
The key is NOT how many data points; the key is HOW ACCURATE your assumptions on the computer are to replicate what will happen in reality. That is still art. If you have a million data points and a shoddy model it is useless against a well correlated, strong foundation model with only a few data points tracking the actual testing results.
Another example of Lexus marketing trying to look intelligent and being technically incompetent.