Immersive Virtual Reality

Abstract

-In this paper, the use of head mounted display immersive virtual reality (VR) is investigated as both a cable harness design routing and an assembly planning tool. Due to the nature of this technology being more intuitive as an interface for generating design and process planning information, it is important to understand in detail the activities being carried out by the designer whilst immersed in the 3D virtual environment since health and safety recommendations dictate a maximum of around 20 minutes exposure for the user.After covering earlier work comparing CAD/VR productivity studies, follow-on work is outlined describing an immersive VR-based design platform developed for the design, assembly planning and installation planning of cable harnesses. This is presented in the form of recent, extensive system evaluations which analysed a number of participants carrying out cable routing design tasks. User activities were broken down using a novel design task categorisation scheme which enabled a detailed understanding of the design activity being carried out. This successfully illustrated where the designers were spending their valuable time being creative, generating design information, navigating through the model, correcting errors, accessing help information, etc. and, for the first time, allowed the system to be statistically evaluated in terms of performance and category relationships. The categorisation scheme provides a valuable formal tool for understanding design behaviour and could be used not only with immersive VR design systems but for comparing different design platforms such as CAD systems. As well as this, non-intrusive logging also enable assembly planner activities to be monitored and recorded; the subsequent analysis of this data enabled chronological cable harness assembly and cable harness installation plans to be automatically produced along with the incorporation of real-world estimates of assembly times. TECHNICAL PAPER -The use of interactive immersive virtual reality (VR) will become popular in the near future for the conceptual and detail design of new products, particularly within the car industry. The use of VR will probably mirror the use of CAD systems within this sector in the 1970s which became generally available for 2D drafting on on low-cost PCbased platforms and evolved into CAD systems with extensive real-time solid modelling capabilities. Also important is the generation of downstream information in the form of manufacturing and assembly plans. Since VR will be an significant competitive technology in industry it is important that its impact and application are understood so that interfaces and systems can be developed which substantially enhance the capabilities of both design and manufacturing engineers. This work focuses on head-mounted display (HMD) immersive VR being used as a tool for the design of cable harness routes and the subsequent automatic generation of harness assembly plans and installation plans. The main focus being on proving whether the engine...

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