AeroVR: An immersive visualisation system for aerospace design and digital twinning in virtual reality

Abstract

One of today’s most propitious immersive technologies is virtual reality (VR). This term is colloquially associated with headsets that transport users to a bespoke, built-for-purpose immersive 3D virtual environment. It has given rise to the field of immersive analytics—a new field of research that aims to use immersive technologies for enhancing and empowering data analytics. However, in developing such a new set of tools, one has to ask whether the move from standard hardware setup to a fully immersive 3D environment is justified—both in terms of efficiency and development costs. To this end, in this paper, we present AeroVR—an immersive aerospace design environment with the objective of aiding the component aerodynamic design process by interactively visualizing performance and geometry. We decompose the design of such an environment into function structures, identify the primary and secondary tasks, present an implementation of the system, and verify the interface in terms of usability and expressiveness. We deploy AeroVR on a prototypical design study of a compressor blade for an engine.

IPCP: Immersive Parallel Coordinates Plots for Engineering Design Processes

“…26 In addition, users can freely move within and maneuver in the 3D space to explore all parts of the visualization. 4 Furthermore, our system augments the pattern identification task with 3D scatter plots, [4][5][6] that can substantially aid users in isolating groups of data items that can potentially form patterns.…”

“…This is The green markers with accompanying letters are showing mapping between the action-buttons on both types of controllers. The description of user's movement in the 3D space together with interaction details can be found in Tadeja et al 5,6 a high-dimensional design space with many controllable and uncontrollable parameters. Controllable parameters include rendering parameters, such as colors and shapes, visual/auditory feedback design, interaction techniques, and choice of headset and hardware controllers.…”

“…3 (a-b). The color-coded cones a were used to denote both the selected dimensions over the IPCP and axes directions at the scatter plots, 5,6 see Fig. 3 (a, c).…”

“…(c) The selected dimensions are colour-coded and marked on the IPCP with a number of cones. The design of these 3D floating scatter plots was adopted from Tadeja et al [4][5][6] .…”

“…A description of the first thereof which briefly discusses the observational user study, results of which we used to trim the vast design space, can be found in Tadeja et al 4 The underpinning VR system that included the basis of interaction techniques i.e. the gaze-tracking and racy tracing facilitated by a cross-hair was discussed in Tadeja et al 5,6 and is built based on the Unity VR Samples Pack 7 that utilizes the well-know concept of a cross-hair to simulate the user's gaze (for instance, see orange circle in Fig. 4) and Oculus Utilities for Unity 8 together with some elements from the Unity asset store packages.…”