VIRTUAL REALITY TOOLS & THE DESIGN PROCESS

Virtual Reality Tools & The Design Process

Virtual Reality Tools & The Design Process

Introduction

Within product design and manufacture, the cost of virtual reality (VR) tools is reducing and, in the near future, it is envisaged that they will become widely used throughout industry as a major part of the product life cycle process. Due to this anticipated expansion, there is a need to investigate how such VR tools could have an impact on the design and manufacturing processes. In addition, some new tools which may help increase the future use of VR need to be researched, such as user-interface analysis and the automatic generation and analysis of product engineering information.

Due to the nature of VR systems, and the manner in which they are programmed, it is straightforward to implement routines which allow user actions to be logged unobtrusively. By analysing the information embedded in the logged data, useful design knowledge can be extracted and used as a basis for an interactive help system to train new users and store knowledge for future analysis and use.

Virtual Reality Tools & The Design Process

This paper focuses on utilising and expanding the capabilities of a well tried and tested cable harness virtual aided design (VAD) system as a tool for the analysis of industrially equivalent harness routing and assembly planning tasks. This tool has been successfully compared with a number of CAD systems and found to provide considerable productivity benefits over traditional computer-based techniques. Prior research, presented in , demonstrated that the user-logged data has been successfully used to automatically generate assembly sequence plans and IDEF0 assembly diagrams.

This has subsequently laid the foundations for design rationale capture through identifying methods for recognising signature patterns relating to design activities for cable harness routing and assembly planning. In this paper, a prototype information push system is proposed which offers automated assistance to users during a design task by combining the monitoring of user activities and utilising design knowledge that has been previously captured. As well as allowing expert design knowledge to be taught to new users, it is envisaged that such a system can be used to train engineers in maintenance-related tasks.

The immersive VR apparatus is detailed in Section 2 whilst the experimental methodology used to investigate this design domain is presented in Section 3. In Section 3, the various formal representations that have been used to represent the design knowledge extracted from the log files are presented while, in Section 4, an overview of how the design knowledge has been used to develop an online help system is detailed. Finally, a discussion of the results is presented in Section 5 before ending with some conclusions.

VR takes many forms with a wide array of technologies classified as being virtual environments (VE) in one form or another. VR has, and is, being used in the engineering of products using a wide variety of technology. In this paper, the focus is on a virtual environment where users wear a head-mounted display (HMD), ...