Luxury EV maker Lucid Motors (Lucid) has registered eye-catching results with ‘Lucid Studio Live', its virtual shared vehicle discovery experience. Based on real-time CGI technology from British tech firm ZeroLight, Lucid Studio Live users are twice as likely to place a vehicle reservation compared to customers who have a typical sales interaction.

The Lucid Studio Live sessions involve Lucid's trained product experts guiding prospective customers through a shared configuration session that blends the intimacy of the dealership with the convenience of an online configurator. The platform has enabled Lucid to bring its direct sales strategy to life virtually, presenting the Lucid Air to customers in incredible detail. So engaging and informative is the guided exploration of the photorealistic 3D Lucid Air model, that each Lucid Studio Live session lasts an average of 46 minutes and 37 seconds.

With many car buyers less inclined to visit showrooms (McKinsey & Co, 2021), but still keen to deal with real people when finalising their purchases (Bain & Company, 2021), Lucid Studio Live offers the best of both online and physical worlds. Buyers can now engage with sales representatives in surroundings familiar and comfortable to them, while exploring a new vehicle in ways that, until now, have been impossible in the virtual world.

Lucid Studio Live enables our customers to be guided through the entire purchase journey in a highly engaging way. Lucid Studio Live allows customers to fully explore the Lucid Air at their convenience without requiring them to visit a physical location. The results show that this type of engagement resonates with many of our customers

_{Thomas Orenz, Director of Interactive Digital Marketing, Lucid Motors
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Automotive retail is changing like never before. Customers today are demanding more choice about how and when they interact with their chosen brand. By combining ZeroLight's innovative solutions with Lucid's forward-thinking outlook, we have brought together the very best of the online and in-store shopping experiences into a highly engaging, impactful new solution with proven results.

Darren Jobling, CEO, ZeroLight
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The shared ZeroLight Concierge™ cloud-based 3D configurator that powers Lucid Studio Live enables potential customers to view and spec their dream Air in incredible detail. Using an advanced 3D digital twin of the Air that can be accessed in real-time, the configurator also features ray-tracing technology that's leveraged in advanced video games to ensure graphics are highly realistic.

Features including a variety of California inspired backgrounds and life-like features such as moving waves help to bring the Air to life in highly detailed environments.

The Lucid Studio Live host is able to select from multiple camera angles to guide the customer around the vehicle, while the customer can also retain control of the camera to fine-tune their view and enhance their experience. The host can use the sessions to impart detailed information, provide feature demonstrations, and spec the Air in real-time based on the customer's comments, selecting from different trim levels, colours, alloy wheel designs, interior trim and optional extras.

Once the vehicle configuration is complete and the session has ended, customers are invited to reserve their configured car and are sent a personalised digital brochure that features the very car they have built. This highly detailed customisation process has been designed to reassure customers and make them feel closer to the Lucid brand, wherever they may be.

To offer seamless customer experiences like this, the ZeroLight platform requires readily accessible high performance computing power, which is why it runs on the Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud infrastructure. AWS offers the globally available Amazon EC2 G4 instances and low-latency content delivery tools that enable the ZeroLight platform to reach car-buyers on any device with immersive digital configurator experiences. AWS also empowers the ZeroLight platform and its customers to cost efficiently deliver high-quality photorealistic 3D content to end users.

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