AWS re:Invent 2022 wrap up: How Epic Games, Toyota, and Volkswagen create boundary-pushing simulations on AWS

Simulations help us understand possible real-world outcomes and visualize immersive environments at a massive scale, without the risks of reality. To run these complex workloads, however, companies must push the boundaries of technology by developing innovative solutions and delivering them at an unprecedented scale.

Epic Games provides powerful simulation tools with Unreal Engine

American game developer Epic Games Inc. (Epic Games) renders powerful immersive experiences with Unreal Engine. This solution provides core tools to make hyper realistic simulations across automotive, architecture, entertainment, and other industries. Unreal Engine is powered by several Amazon Web Services (AWS), including Amazon Elastic File System (Amazon EFS) and Amazon FSx. “The combination of the innovation that we’re driving in Unreal Engine and these other tools has really helped the outputs become almost indistinguishable from reality,” says Nathan Thomas, vice president of Unreal Engine at Epic Games. “This is really bridging the uncanny valley and unlocking a huge range of new use cases for these tools.”

With Unreal Engine tools, developers worldwide can build powerful simulations. MetaHuman Creator, powered by Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) G4 Instances and G5 Instances, helps developers generate high-fidelity digital humans in minutes. Over two million characters have been created using this powerful tool. TwinMotion, a 3D visualization tool also powered by Amazon EC2 G4 and G5 Instances, helps developers share high-quality images, panoramas, and 360-degree videos. Developers can also stream interactive experiences using TwinMotion Cloud, a web service running on AWS.

RealityCapture is an AWS-powered desktop application that makes it simple to create ultra-realistic models from images; since its launch, this tool has logged over 100,000 sessions and processed millions of photos. Epic Games will soon launch a mobile version called RealityScan on iOS.

Watch the AWS re:Invent 2022 customer keynote below and learn how Epic Games continues to innovate on AWS, helping creators to deliver immersive simulations and 3D experiences.

Toyota builds an edge-to-cloud solution to analyze test vehicle data

Toyota Motor Corporation (Toyota) is pushing the frontier of autonomous vehicle development using an edge-to-cloud DataOps solution on AWS. Powered by Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) and Akridata Data Explorer, a data curation and visualization tool available in AWS Marketplace, the company can collect, analyze, and display data from hundreds of test vehicles and facilitate collaboration across multiple regions.

With its DataOps solution on AWS, the Japanese automotive company has vastly accelerated its speed of innovation. It can scale quickly to collect and create usable data for teams, delivering data 5 times faster and increasing data-delivery capacity by 10 times. “We’ve shortened the time from our ingestion process significantly. The unit of measurement I’d use before would be months,” says Timothy Holman, senior engineering manager at Toyota. “The unit of measurement today is days. And I will tell you that we have plans to make those into hours or minutes.”

Volkswagen Commercial Vehicles (Volkswagen) automates autonomous vehicle data workloads

Volkswagen is driving forward its autonomous vehicle ambitions with the creation of SNOWPARK, a cutting-edge data environment powered by AWS. Using services like AWS Snowcone and AWS Lambda, the German vehicle manufacturer has automated critical tasks in its analytics pipeline, including data processing, preparation, and extraction. Volkswagen has also democratized data access to drive decision-making. “Every data scientist has their own workbench instance, where they have all the tools that they need for their analysis,” says Dr. Mohammad Al-Rifai, principal data scientist at Volkswagen.

On AWS, Volkswagen is helping stakeholders make better-informed decisions to bring fully autonomous vehicles into reality. With its visualization tools, stakeholders across teams can better understand data and make better decisions, helping create autonomous vehicles that are safe, effective, and enjoyable. It hopes to help MOIA, a ride-hailing service in Germany, make its fleet completely autonomous by 2025.

Check out the AWS re:Invent 2022 session, Autonomous driving simulation and validation on AWS, and learn how Toyota and Volkswagen continue to innovate on AWS, using simulations to accelerate the automotive industry.