Colour technology specialist X-Rite, and its subsidiary Pantone, has won the iF Design Award for its Virtual Light Booth (VLB).
A team of 63 judges, made up of independent experts from all over the world, reviewed a total of 6400 entries and selected the VLB as a winner in the product discipline.
X-Rite says the VLB forms part of a comprehensive solution that brings a new level of accuracy and realism to the capture, communication and digital presentation of physical materials in the virtual world. Francis Lamy, executive vice president and chief technology officer at X-Rite, says, “It’s a great honour to win the prestigious iF Design Award for our Total Appearance Capture solution for the second consecutive year. Total Appearance Capture, of which VLB is a key component, is the culmination of sixty years of colour and appearance science. I’m very proud of the entire TAC development team that has brought this innovation to life.”
X-Rite’s says its Total Appearance Capture ecosystem addresses a key challenge in product design: the ability to accurately capture and virtualise today’s increasingly complex materials such as special effect paints and synthetic fabrics. The VLB, the industry’s first 3D visualisation environment for evaluating material appearance, allows users to accurately and efficiently visualise and compare 3D digital material renderings side by side with physical samples under a variety of lighting conditions. This helps ensure consistency between digital prototypes and final physical products. It empowers designers to make more informed material selection decisions reducing approval cycles and time to market.
The company says the full Total Appearance Capture ecosystem enables product designers, 3D artists, material specifiers and marketers to create digital materials representations that simulate physical appearance characteristics such as colour, texture, gloss, refraction, transparency, special effects (sparkles), and reflection properties. This helps streamline the overall design and manufacturing process and deliver the most compelling, photorealistic 3D visuals possible, according to X-Rite.
The Total Appearance Capture ecosystem comprises the TAC7 scanner, the Pantora Material Hub desktop application, and the VLB.
