We have worked with Bentley across a number of projects, mainly alongside their Experience Design and Electrical Engineering teams.
The largest of these is the interior lighting system for the new Bentley Torcal, a fully interactive, addressable lighting system running through the entire cabin. It ingests information in real time, the driver, the passengers, the environment outside and the state of the car itself, and resolves all of it into elegant animation across the interior. Nothing is pre-recorded. Every frame is generated live.
The whole system is not meant to be running on a media server in a rack, but the car's own ECUs. Every part of it had to be efficient enough and reliable enough to live inside a production vehicle for the whole of its life. Hundreds of signals arrive from the vehicle's sensors, and millions of lines of code, including a full set of custom TouchDesigner operators we built for the job, turn them into light, inside an architecture portable enough to survive the move into series production.
Bentley's Experience Design department owns the design. We architected the system, wrote the code and prototyped it, delivering a final code package the fabricators could compile into machine code.
Alongside the Torcal we have run several R&D projects with Bentley, all sitting at the edge between technology and art.
