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The Mill BLACKBIRD can be virtually any car you want

Here’s something you may never had to think about in your life: how difficult is it to procure cars for adverts and movies? According to a company called The Mill, it’s very difficult indeed, and time consuming too. The solution? The BLACKBIRD, which has some fancy tricks to make it look like any car you want.

Before you start thinking of Transformers and shapeshifting, the BLACKBIRD only does some of that. It’s goal is to mimic any car’s performance and presence on camera thanks to several points of adjustment. This car can have its length adjusted by four feet (1.21 metres) and its width by ten inches (25.4 centimetres). The suspension and the wheels too can be changed out.

According to The Mill, once you’ve mimicked these aspects of a real car, all you need to do is add some CG trickery to make it look real. See it in action if you don’t believe us:

A lot of other really cool tech is mentioned there, including virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR).

The VR tricks come from a cluster of cameras on the top of the BLACKBIRD similar to what you see on those Google Street View cars. It capture video which can be used to create a VR experience of any drives this car takes.

The AR portion is what looked the most impressive here. We thought that you’d only be able to see the BLACKBIRD as a different car once you spent many hours recreating it with CG, but an app lets you see changes in real time.

The only question we have left to ask is what the price is. You won’t find it on the product page and we couldn’t find it elsewhere. We assume it’s one of those “price on request” deals, so we’ve emailed The Mill to find out.

Lastly, that name. It’s name is an intentional nod to the famous Lockheed SR-71 Blackbird stealth plane – as this car was apparently built in the exact same hanger as the plane. Hopefully it’s not used to spy on Russia.

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