Lucid Motors went public on Monday, and although I am not going to be buying a Lucid anytime soon, I found myself looking at their vehicle configurato

The Lucid Motors Configurator is A Video Game Streaming to Your Browser

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2021-07-29 17:00:11

Lucid Motors went public on Monday, and although I am not going to be buying a Lucid anytime soon, I found myself looking at their vehicle configurator out of curiosity. It is a piece of art. It allows you to observe and interact with the vehicle from almost every direction, inside and out:

You can simulate various colours and trims, open and close the doors, and even retract the center console display. The backdrop of the Golden Gate bridge reflects off the glassy puddles. The configurator preserves all sorts of details of the vehicle, including lights under the door handles that activate when you are using them. I feel like I got an accurate enough feel for the vehicle, I don’t even have to see it in person anymore.

So how did Lucid manage to pull this off? Can you expect the average user’s web browser to render a scene like this in real-time, reflections and all? The answer is probably not. It works because the scene you are seeing is rendered with Unity, a video game engine, running in the cloud - offloading the intense computational load to an Amazon server - and streamed back to your browser via WebRTC - a peer-to-peer video streaming protocol.

Initially, I naively assumed that the model was being renderred in my browser via the latest WebGL library (an API for rendering 2D and 3D graphics in web browsers with hardware acceleration). And since the model must have been renderred locally, it had to exist in my RAM somewhere, so I could extract it and load it up in a 3D model editor. Specifically, I wanted to see if I could remove the sun visors interrupting the almost seamless glass canopy - an effect achieved by Tesla’s Model X, I’m not sure why Lucid didn’t follow.

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