AI, Digital Twins Reshaping Advertising and Car Creation at JLR

April 29, 2024

Sebastian Blanco

Accenture had interactive demos of its chat-based, generative AI visualization program at NVIDIA GTC 2024. The technology uses NVIDIA’s Omniverse platform, as well as the Edify and Picasso tools. (Sebastian Blanco)

Better digital twins powered by more powerful AI are going to change not just how car commercials are created in the future, but could open the door to entirely new design and engineering methods.

Using generative AI and digital models supplied by JLR, Accenture’s project can use chat input to quickly adjust immersive visual files. Starting with an image of the car in a non-descript area… (Accenture)

That was one message delivered at a panel discussion on “Generative AI and Industrial Digitalization in the Automotive Industry” at NVIDIA’s GTC 2024 event in San Jose, California, in March. Jaguar Land Rover’s chief data and AI officer, Chrissie Kemp, said JLR was able to leverage the digital twin capability in NVIDIA’s Omniverse platform, including the Edify and Picasso microservices for generative AI, to render high-fidelity images of a Defender in its appropriate environments just by using conversational prompts. Saying, “take me to the mountains,” for example, transforms the background of the photorealistic video, making it look like the car is driving there.

…a user can say, “Take me to the top of the mountain”… (Accenture)

… and the system quickly responds and can then adjust again … (Accenture)

“When you live in a house of brands like we do now, we’re just imagining the potential of what this could do for Range Rover, for new Jaguar and beyond,” she said. “To be able to just literally say, ‘I want to see this Explorer pack,’ or ‘I want to see in Pangea green,’ it blows your mind about what’s possible. It makes you think more about digital twins. It makes you think about the creative process, of the beginning.

“Imagine you’re conceiving a new vehicle. Imagine you want to see that vehicle throughout its entire life, how it’s been driving, if it’s been autonomous, what its behaviors have been with client A, but then maybe it’s been owned by client B. And you can really imagine this kind of digital copy of every physical asset that we have. And I think that’s truly amazing with what’s now possible.”

Accenture’s six-week project

JLR worked with NVIDIA and Accenture on the project, which took just six weeks to come together. JLR provided the digital vehicle model and models of the various parts and Accenture designers added material changes and “eye candy” like the background mountains with an eye towards using the files in future advertisments, said Teemu Nordman, who works on ramping up Omniverse technology at Accenture.

… when the user might say, “I prefer green, with big wheels”… (Accenture)

… opening up the door for what’s possible not only with configurators but also as tools for designers and engineers. (Accenture)

“You can use the Picasso for AI to build this implementation,” Nordman told SAE Media. “They are currently building 360-degree API to generate these pictures so that you don’t need to bring your car to a specific location to shoot. What we can do here is move the background and car on this specific timescale to demonstrate that it’s really there, not just a video. The tool is for the marketing on JLR’s side so that they don’t need to have the real shooting and a real car anymore.”

The technology could one day be used by JLR customers, too. JLR’s current online configurator is powered by Unreal, but Accenture is using the digital twin to build a new online configurator concept for JLR that is integrated with OpenAI for next-generation functionality.

“Basically there’s configurator behind it so you can have different colors, different wheels, tires, and all those packages,” he said. “And then it’s possible, just by chatting, to say, ‘make it more sporty’ and then it chooses the wheels and the color, things that are more sporty.”

Despite how easy it will be to make digital advertising assets in the future, Kemp said JLR would keep the digital situations based on what’s possible in the real world.

“I think we’ll have to work hard to make sure that absolutely the physical attributes of the car are never ever, ever overstated or not real,” she told SAE Media. “I think certainly with the generation that’s coming next, I don’t think they’ll mind as much as long as they know that the physical attributes of the car are really what they say they are. I mean, how many times do you take your Defender up a mountain? It can do it, though.”

Kemp said it is still early days, but JLR will have a policy about being open with the public when it uses AI, but don’t ask her what that is just yet.

“We will absolutely have a policy,” she said. “We’ve only just started, but we absolutely will have one.”