Embedded Software Engineering

Car Configurator – 3DCar software engineering goals disclosed

These days, the utility of a car configurator is well-known: the configurator is an efficient tool used in the sales process and helps the prospect in quicker choosing his favorite configuration, leading him to the proper dealers. It has an important contribution to the marketing policies of manufacturers and dealers world-wide. 3D car configurators are new, and ought to be built according to some quality rules.

This article discloses the goals pursued by the software engineering process of 3DCar(TM), one of the earliest (probably the very first) fully interactive 3D car configurators, a endeavor started in 2005 by Bluemind Software, at a moment in time when even 2D car configurators were a rarity. The 3DCar(TM) car configurator was disclosed to public only a short period ago on YouTube!

Bluemind Software, the company which develops 3DCar(TM) has granted the author the permission to make this information public, since he was the originator of the 3DCar concept and also since the exposure may benefit them and the car configurator.

The persued Software System Engineering goals, when developing the 3D car configurator, were (and still are):

• straightforward and fast usage
• stability
• maximize the interactivity of users with the car
• make itself accessible on numerous means of presentation
• expandability, flexibility
• maximize exposure by offering higher performance (for high polygon count) with lower system requirements
• interfacing with the existing sales system and also including marketing tools

At the time the project was started, technology for browser embedding was pretty unstable, caused significant performance losses and could not sustain the high interactivity of such a complex application.

Other solutions that appeared meanwhile and used a variety of technologies for browser embedding, used to show a lot of blue-screens and crash the browsers or the whole operating system. 3DCar uses a web-start ability (like some of the Java applications use) for usage with browsers. This assures very good performance and allows it to display models consisting of over 1 million triangles even on 5-6 year old PCs.

However, new technologies were constantly observed and, finally, a robust and fitting solution seems to have appeared (more on this in a upcoming article).

As one can notice, following these goals means to develop a quality software system (in our case, a car configurator) which works correctly on a variety of presentation platforms, is easy to understand and use to the end-user and is very performant, thus also lowering the costs of the deployment platforms. The author believes that following these goals is mandatory for all software applications developed.

About the Author

You can learn more concerning 3DCar(TM) and see YouTube movies at the 3D car configurator website. Bluemind Software is the author’s company and it’s mission is to bring it’s contribution by means of quality software development and webdesign services, along with developing it’s own innovative products, like 3DCar.

Software Engineering for Embedded Systems