Volvo to Use Unreal Engine For ‘Photorealistic’ EV Displays

Swedish car manufacturer Volvo has announced it’s partnering with Epic Games to give in-car graphics a serious upgrade. The company will be using the Unreal engine for its next generation of vehicle interfaces, which it promises will be “photorealistic.” The company will begin by focusing on the information displayed to the driver. It will then transition to more grandiose plans of rendering realistic graphics for in-car apps and information. Sadly we will have to wait longer than a fortnight (badump-ching) for it to appear in cars on the road. There is no timeline or any information on when it will arrive in the next generation of Volvo’s electric cars.

The partnership is the first of its kind for a European car company. It follows last year’s announcement by American car maker GMC that it would be using the Unreal Engine in an upcoming EV Hummer. Rivian has also said it’s using Unreal for its R1T pickup truck. It promises lifelike 3D rendering and animations for in-car displays, with Volvo focusing first on the Driver Information Module (DIM). This display (above) sits atop the steering wheel and takes the place of the dashboard. It’s part of Volvo and Epic’s focus on the Human-Machine Interface (HMI), which is how electric car owners interact with their car’s software. A Volvo spokesman said using the Unreal Engine to translate the myriad types of data the car receives will help it achieve its vision of “zero collision.”

Even though the software will be originally designed by Epic, the company will then hand it off to an in-house development team at Volvo. This will allow the company to release updates and fix bugs, according to The Verge. It’s working on an entirely new operating system dubbed VolvoCars.OS to unify the entirety of the car’s software programs. Those include Android Automotive OS, Blackberry’s QNX, Linux, and the Automotive Open System known as AUTOSAR. Powering the system will be two SoCs made by Nvidia. One will be used for the car’s driving functionality, with the other being responsible for autonomous capabilities.

Volvo’s announcement is another feather in Epic’s cap in its push to get Unreal engine into more vehicles. The company has an HMI and Embedded systems team working on the UI for vehicles. The task of creating realistic 3D images isn’t all fun and games though. The company has to walk a fine line between making graphics that are lifelike and impressive while being careful to not distract the driver at the same time. As far as what it will actually look like in-car, GMC has a mockup of what its Hummer UI will look like. However, it notes the images are all renders instead of in-car graphics. Epic Games also has a splash page highlighting its HMI work with Unreal Engine too.