Giugi Design Engineering Car Designer and Virtual Vehicle Simulator
Giugi Design
My 1983-1986 diversion into residential home construction was a decision process
to choose between custom design (i.e. architecture) and product design (i.e. cars).
My interest in cars exploded during this period in Northfield, MN.
I had always admired the VW Scirocco and finally had the cash to acquire one.
My intrigue for water-cooled VW's grew deep.
I turbo-charged my Scirocco in 1985,
optimizing the engine power output from the stock 76 HP to a neck-snapping 215 HP.
I came to admire everything that Giorgetto Giugiaro (Ital Design) touched.
While I owned the poor-man's Giugiaro, my favorites were the Alpha GTV6 and Lotus Espirit.
When I left residential contracting to pursue a career in automotive design,
I created my own design shingle: Giugi Design.
The logo was inspired from my mathematical background with interests in
Möbius and
MC Escher.
Car Designer
GDE Car Designer was a dynamic vehicle simulator based on
initially a 2DOF model of four tire patches and
later 3DOF and 4DOF models, including suspension components.
The computer program was modeled from the contents of Robert White's Vehicle Dynamics I & II courses at UIUC.
The courses included laboratory work where vehicles were measured statically and dynamically in every way.
On the weekends, the vehicles would be raced in SCCA solo competitions, with various modifications learned from the lab work.
Simulations in the courses used FORTRAN to submit off-line simulations to UIUC's mainframe computer.
The software was initially inspired to shorten the design iteration time.
GDE Car Designer was written in AutoLisp and shown here running within AutoCAD on a PC.
It was portable across all AutoCAD platforms and demonstrated on MacOS and HP Unix.
Virtual Driving Sim
When I transferred to Stanford, my focus became more human-centric,
wanting to put these tools into first-person in an immersive environment.
The image below shows a 1990 depiction of a driving simulator with a physical buck,
but head-mounted visuals.
I was new to VR at the time, and did not realize how encumbering an HMD would be for more than a few minutes.
Ford and Volvo became sponsors and shipped us a steering column and seat respectively.