The Yacht Insider: Simulated Interior Design Gets Real
Forget Fabric Swatches. Think "Animated Video."
Patrick Knowles Designs, which made big news at last year's Fort Lauderdale International Boat Show as the creator of the spectacular interior aboard the 164-foot Trinity Mine Games, is hoping to make just as big an impression at this year's show—with the interior design for a yacht that won't even launch until 2009.
The yacht in question is the 161-foot Trinity Blind Date, the first build for which Knowles has created an incredibly realistic, three-dimensional simulation of how the interior will look. I'm talking about far more than just full-color renderings here. This 360-degree technology includes animation that simulates a walk-through and lets the owner see how everything will look, right down to shadows and light, long before the interior is built.
At first glance, I didn't even realize the images were renderings. They look nearly photo-realistic, including the fabric textures.
"Every choice of fabric, furniture, lighting, accessory and finish was communicated to a very high degree of accuracy to our 3-D rendering artists, more than a year prior to project completion," Knowles said in a press release. "As a result, we were able to provide our client with 360-degree, 3-D imagery of all the main living spaces, and an animated virtual tour experience starting from an aerial exterior view—as if approaching the vessel aboard a helicopter—right on through a walking tour of each deck of this magnificent vessel."
How cool is that? It's virtually virtual reality, albeit without the funky glasses and video beams streaming right into your eyeballs. The Knowles system is, hands down, an order of magnitude better than any other renderings I've seen from yacht interior designers worldwide. I can even envision applications for "boat of the future" brochures that could be passed electronically to potential charter clients.
We won't know about the accuracy of the computer-generated visuals until Blind Date launches next year, of course, but until then, I'm happy to give kudos to Knowles for apparently, and finally, making fabric swatches obsolete.
