Industrial Virtual Reality Engineering Applications

Virtual Reality (VR) in conjunction with Immersive Projection Technology (IPT) are well introduced and highly accepted in the international society of institutional research. But does the (manufacturing) industry share this excitement about recent stereo projection technology? What are the key factors of successfully creating a VR solution with production quality? How to identify fields of application and how to get return on invest? These questions will be addressed especially for the automotive industry. While some of the considerations hold for other manufacturing industries as well, some do not. Problems and solutions will be discussed on sample installations and applications for the automotive industry. These VR systems help engineers to deal with different problems: • evaluation of exterior car design, • analysis of thermal comfort in a car cabin, • visualization of a production line • acceptance of tools for deep drawing We will outline the different projection and software technologies used for these engineering tasks as well as the user interface aspects, because there is a special correlation between used projection technology and useful user interaction. The careful design of a special purpose 3D user interface is one of the keys for user productivity and user acceptance.