Background
Ford's Australian design studio in Melbourne is responsible for vehicles including the Ford Ranger, Ranger Raptor and Everest. Over the past several years the studio's visualisation team has built mixed reality into the core of how those vehicles are designed, using headsets that composite photorealistic digital vehicles into the real studio space.
The approach sits deliberately between virtual and augmented reality. Rather than replacing the studio with a fully digital world, or simply overlaying data on the real one, designers see a full-size digital vehicle standing in the physical studio, and can walk around it, crouch beside it and look underneath.
The deployment
The team uses Varjo XR-3 headsets, chosen for a level of photorealism that visualisation manager Andrew Dallan-Jones has described as giving designers real confidence in what they are seeing. Mixed reality is applied across the whole design process, from early theme exploration and conceptual work through to detailed scrutiny of interior and exterior surfaces once a direction has been chosen.
Crucially, the technology has not displaced traditional craft. The studio continues to build physical prototypes and clay models, and the visualisation team frames mixed reality as extending how much can be explored digitally before committing to physical build, rather than as a replacement for clay modelling skills.
The virtual pit
One of the deployment's more unusual features began as an internal demonstration. To show colleagues how convincing the experience had become, the team created a virtual hole that appeared in the studio floor when a headset was put on. Visitors would approach the edge carefully and try to peer down into it, treating it as physically real even while knowing it was not.
That demo turned into a working tool. The team placed a vehicle inside the pit on a platform that could be raised and lowered virtually. Obtaining a top-down view of a physical prototype normally requires designers to climb to a mezzanine level; with the virtual pit they can stand around the vehicle at floor level and look down, producing viewpoints that are difficult to achieve with physical models.
Global design reviews
The Melbourne studio works with Ford design teams in the United States, Europe and China. Previously those colleagues had to fly to Australia, and typically only once a design had reached an advanced stage. Mixed reality allows high-resolution, face-to-face design reviews to be conducted in real time instead, so reviews happen more often and are no longer constrained by travel schedules. Design directors can give decisions live, while work is still in progress.
Outcomes and adoption
The visualisation team reports that parts of the design process that previously took months now take weeks, attributing the compression to earlier and more frequent digital exploration and to the removal of travel from the review cycle.
Adoption has been straightforward on the mechanical side: most designers are comfortable moving around a virtual vehicle within minutes of putting on a headset. The harder shift has been one of trust, as designers accustomed to relying on physical models build confidence that real design decisions can be made from what they see virtually.
Where it goes next
The team expects fidelity to keep improving in materials, lighting and reflections, further blurring the boundary between virtual and physical review. Their stated priority is integration: making movement between virtual and physical work feel seamless, and extending the tools beyond visualisation into the wider design workflow.
