I was asked by OPTIS, a French based multi-national light simulation software developer, to photograph their “Industry Day” at the Virtual Engineering Centre at Daresbury Science & Innovation Campus.
OPTIS’ software enables designers, engineers and ergonomists to analyse and optimise the lighting performance and appearance of future products without the expense building physical models.
One such example was presented by designers from car manufacturer Bentley, who wanted to ensure that there were no distracting reflections from their illuminated dashboard dials in the windscreen and side windows of their cars.
It would, obviously, be very expensive and time consuming to produce real-life physical models of their cars to test the lighting, but the OPTIS software made this a relatively simple process.
The delegates included design teams from Aston Martin, Bentley, Jaguar and Toyota (USA) and all in all, it was a very interesting day. One particularly interesting presentation was by Liverpool University on Vision and Colour perception, which is a very important subject for us photographers!
