CATER Demonstrations

Since the project launch in September 2006, CATER has been focusing on developing new tools for mass customization of vehicles, targeting the vehicle manufacturers, the marketing and sales people, as well as the end users: a Citarasa Engineering system (emotional intent design concepts), a Web Based 3D Do-it-Yourself-Design system and VR Interfaces for both the customers & product planners and the MArK system. Below are presented some of the project web-based demonstrations, in which you are cordially invited to participate and provide us with your comments or suggestions.

CATER's Citarasa System The Citarasa System is a Web-based tool for elicitation and analysis of customer affective needs. It is linked to the Citarasa Database that stores the data. There are two modules – Citarasa Elicitation and Citarasa Analysis. The Citarasa Elicitation module allows you to explore your affective needs for car components, such as body colour, seat design, steering wheel, wheel rim, and side mirror. For the truck, you can explore your needs for design of interior living cab. The Citarasa Analysis module enables analysis of customer affective needs in specific markets of Europe and Asia. The results are generated in graphical format and can be exported to Excel spreadsheet for further analysis.

The Citarasa System is easy to use and the process is simple ― just Capture Data à Record à Analyse Data. This is the first tool that supports product planning and market analysis by both customers and vehicle end users, from OEM, product planner, design engineer to dealer, and supplier. You are invited to assess the Citarasa system and provide us with your feedback.

CATER's VR Interface for the Vehicle Planners After the CATER system had been deployed and used for a while (i.e. each 6 months), product planners from vehicle manufacturers should refresh all car configurations (proposed to user depending on their profile and their citarasa) according to any technical improvements or new components available from any stakeholder in the chain, and, more important, according to the user statistical data experienced during the last period. A VR interface – shown in the video - has been developed within CATER in this purpose. Standing in front of or within a VR equipment, the product planners can start the CATER-Re-configuration Tool shown in the video.

The product planner first selects the intended customer group (you can see simple example in the video: male or female, style, region of origin, etc.). Then, the system proposes the car with the preferred options/configuration for the selected profile. The product planner is able to move around or inside the car, which he can change the configuration for some features (wheels, steering wheel, mirrors, etc.). The 3D representation of the objects proposed are very accurate, and for each option, the product planners can access statistical data, i.e. how many customers have purchased this option or this colour in last period. This VR interface, intended to the product planners, is thus expected to dramatically ease the vehicle re-configuration process, making it better integrated with both databases from component manufacturers and the user history statistical data, from the marketing departments. Click here to view the video

CATER Online Vehicle Configurator CATER has developed a web user interface for mass customization, powered by citarasa technology, to support the customer in vehicle configuration tasks, taking into account emotional and functional criteria. The web-based demonstration enables the user to configure either a car or a truck. Click here to access the demo

CATER's VR Interface for the Customers One of the output of the CATER project is an immersive vehicle configurator for the customers. In future such a system will help customers to "design" their own cars in virtual reality. The system is based on a stereoscopic TV set, which is now commercially available. It allows for stereo vision using so-called shutter glasses. There have not been any applications, which could make use of this hardware. Fraunhofer IAO supplemented its well-known software platform “Lightning” accordingly and equipped the TV set with a high performance tracking system for sensing head movements, which resulted in a fully equipped VR system.

Such configurators could be installed at car dealers’ showrooms, in order to allow the customers to experience the selected options in a realistic way within virtual reality, before making decision what to order. On the one hand this adds to the internet configurators used today showing typically only small images of the chosen configuration and are not able to give a real spatial impression. On the other hand they add to a test drive in a real car, which normally does not meet the preferences of the customer in all aspects. Thus the VR configurator turns out to be a perfect link in the “virtual” sales process.

CATER MArK System CATER has developed a Middleware for Aggregated Knowledge Representation, Access and Retrieval (MArK) to support the automotive product design and development and to benchmark for both the vehicle manufacturers and their suppliers. MArK consists of two modules; which are 2D content based image retrieval as well as support semantic and middleware

With the development of the search engine, a significant step has been made, regarding the main objective of the CATER project. The efficiency in content retrieval can be further improved if the explicit and tacit knowledge of the human is translated into semantic information by analyzing human's explicit operations like manual annotation, query by example, feedback and intuitive interactions with the system like browsing or objects manipulations . Click here to access the demo