Virtual Reality — USC Immersive Media Lab
Virtual Reality — USC Immersive Media Lab
Fab Cars re-imagined car buying for virtual reality — a multi-year research project at USC's School of Cinematic Arts.
Why it matters: the showroom, the configurator, and the test drive all work without a dealership — or a physical car.
Over three years, the lab produced
Three design sources: 1970s racing stripes, LA sculptor John McCracken, and the Mercedes showroom by Kauffmann Theilig & Partner.
Every car spawns from one custom blueprint. Users change paint, interior, and trim in-headset. Forward shading and baked lighting hold VR frame rate.
Four VR drives — desert, city, seaside, and a fantasy world — each a full environment you steer through.
One custom hardware rig — seat, wheel, pedals — and a large curved LED wall put the test drive in the room, not on the street.
"The test drive without the dealership —"
Every terrain started in Houdini Heightfields. Unreal blended materials and spawned foliage straight from terrain attributes.
Houdini Digital Assets ran the pipeline end to end — every environment stayed updatable, all the way through production.
