Yamaha Motor Co. visualizes new product designs with Crystal LED video wall
Sony’s bright, high contrast Crystal LED video wall technology helps in-house design teams with the process of visualising new products and securing senior management’s approval for production.
- Yamaha Motor Co required large image display solution to replace previous projector
- Projected images suffered from limitations including narrow viewing angles and need to keep room lights off
- Sony Crystal LED B-series (ZRD-B15A) display system
- Video wall dimensions: 4.26 x 2.39m
- Number of cabinets: 49
- Image resolution: 3,360 x 1,890 pixels
- Spectacular image clarity and consistency
- Rich, colourful images with excellent contrast, depth and black levels
- Supports faster, more accurate review and approval of new product designs
Yamaha Motor’s core areas of expertise are power trains, electronic control, chassis and hulls, and manufacturing technology. We have expanded our business into a multi-axial one through this technology- offering products such as motorcycles in land mobility, boats in maritime mobility, and robotics. We have grown to offer our products to clients from over 180 countries. Our goal is to offer new excitement and a more fulfilling life for people all over the world. We strive to use our ingenuity and passion to realize peoples’ dreams and always be the ones they look up to for “the next excitement”.
Yamaha Motor
Mr. Isokari
Yamaha Motor
Mr. Nishijima
Yamaha Motor
Mr. Toda
Capturing the essence of high-quality product design
The lifelike visualisation of large, highly detailed images is an essential part of designing new products like motorcycles for Yamaha Motor Co. When offering potential designs for consideration to senior management, it’s important for the design team to accurately determine colours and shapes at the early stages of a project as an aid to quick decision-making.
Stepping up from previous visualisation solutions
The projection solution previously used by Yamaha Motor to visualise its new designs had several disadvantages. These included deterioration of projected image quality over time, long start-up times, narrow viewing angles and the need to turn off room lights.
One of various options explored to replace the projector was Sony’s Crystal LED modular video wall system. The team carefully evaluated the technology’s potential contribution to its development efficiency, including factors such as costs and ease of maintance. Their conclusion was that Crystal LED offered several advantages over large display offerings from other manufacturers.
Seeing fine nuances of colour, shadow and light
The spectacular picture quality of Crystal LED created an immediate impression with Yamaha Motors’ designers, who expressed being ‘awestruck’ when experiencing its super-size images for the first time. Team members instantly identified the rich, accurate colour reproduction of Crystal LED, with an impressive ability to display deep, true blacks and subtle shades of grey – a limitation of their previous projector solution.
Yamaha Motors’ designers were impressed by the ‘three-dimensionality’ of visuals produced by Crystal LED, bringing an apparent depth to images that seemed to blur the lines between image and reality. They also praised Crystal LED’s ability to reproduce the glossy sheen of materials that was ‘beyond our expectations’.
Stimulating creativity
The team’s presentation of new projects often combines visualisations with a clay model of the design in front of the display. Prior to adopting Crystal LED, audiences often paid more attention to the physical model than the images being displayed behind it. This situation is now reversed, with images displayed on Crystal LED capturing viewers’ attention and the clay model playing a supplementary role in design presentations. What’s more, subtle details which would normally have gone unnoticed are now reproduced faithfully, allowing the team to refine their designs more than ever before. This has further stimulated their creativity, and now plays an important role in improving overall design quality.
Making presentations more convincing
Since adopting Crystal LED, Yamaha Motors’ designers been able to successfully bridge the gap in understanding between the team and their audience, greatly improving the communication of new ideas. As presentations have become more convincing, even non-design experts can readily visualise what a new product will actually look like in reality, further enhancing the speed and reliability of decision making.
Expanding possibilities
Looking ahead, the team is currently planning to incorporate the use Crystal LED from even earlier stages of a project to review designs in conjunction with engineering teams before their evaluation with senior management. A potential example is Yamaha Motors’ production of boats in sizes ranging up to 20m long, where the designers are curious to see how their larger products will appear on the super-size Crystal LED screen. The team is also considering an expansion in its use of the flexible display solution, for example with the introduction of portable-sized Crystal LED displays to support product planning and development.
