Grand Rapids, Mich., (USA) March 14, 2017 – At the Autodesk Automotive Innovation Forum in Munich, Germany, X-Rite Incorporated, a global leader in colour science and technology, and its subsidiary Pantone LLC, announced the industry’s first immersive Virtual Light Booth (VLB). The VLB allows designers, material suppliers and marketers to accurately and efficiently visualize and compare 3Ddigital material renderings side-by-side with physical samples in an environment that controls all parameters influencing the perception of appearance. Part of the company’s Total Appearance Capture (TAC™) ecosystem, the VLB ensures a new level of consistency between digital prototypes and final physical products. This helps companies reduce approval cycles and accelerate time to market.

As companies transition to digital manufacturing processes, there is a growing need for physically precise virtual designs that represent the true appearance of the final product. To date, CAD and rendering software solutions have been limited in their ability to visualize physical appearance characteristics such as texture, gloss, transparency and opacity. The TAC ecosystem and VLB make it possible to capture and verify the true appearance of a material in a digital environment.

“We have incorporated more than sixty years of colour and appearance science into our state-of-the-art Virtual Light Booth to provide an immersive and interactive experience that allows users to accurately evaluate material appearance in both a physical and virtual world,” says Dr Francis Lamy, Executive Vice President and Chief Technology Officer, X-Rite. “For the first time, VLB allows product teams to compare digital and physical materials under the exact same perceptual conditions – from illumination to contextual to observational factors. With the VLB, design teams can easily vary these conditions to see changes in material performance. As a result, designers can make more informed material selections and reduce approval times and improve product quality.”