Designers gain ability to compare physical and digital materials

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 visualise 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,” said Dr. Francis Lamy, Executive Vice President and Chief Technology Officer, X-Rite.

He continued: “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.”

Turnkey solution for comparing digital and physical material samples
The Virtual Light Booth combines the X-Rite’s SpectraLight QC professional light booth technology with a high-resolution, colour-calibrated LCD display and a real-time colour management engine. A digital material rendering or product simulation is shown on the VLB’s display next to the physical sample.

This enables users to view both the virtual and physical samples under controlled daylight conditions in a standardised visual observation environment. VLB offers users the flexibility of viewing samples under diffuse or spot light sources.

Combining embedded motion tracking sensors, spectrophotometers and colorimeters along with the synchronisation of real-time rendering technology, the VLB delivers a 3D virtual experience that mimics real-life by adjusting the virtual representation as a person’s viewing angle changes. This is especially important when evaluating materials that use special-effect pigments, whose colour and appearance change based on the viewing angle.

“We have taken the complex process of virtual evaluation and developed a turnkey solution that can be used across any design-to-production workflow. Customers do not need to worry about colour calibration, lighting or viewing angles. We have incorporated all of this into the new VLB so that customers can quickly and accurately evaluate virtual and physical materials,” said Lamy.