Virtual Reality

Within the last few years there was a growing trend at universities to establish so called Virtual Reality laboratories as special work places. This trend follows the need for better visualisation, both of research findings and of teaching content. The use of Virtual Reality systems for educational purposes at universities improves the imparting of complex issues and therefore enables a faster and more purposeful expert education. The visualisation of the relevant teaching content, using the virtual-interactive environment in combination with practical training, will help to improve the training results [1]. This paper outlines the potentials of the Virtual Reality technology for the university education.

Virtual Engineering is an important tool to verify and optimise products in early design phases. For the development of innovative complex technical systems the applied models should comprehend the most important product properties. Up to now there are deficits in modelling and evaluating the acoustic behaviour of technical products although this is important in areas with rigid ergonomic and comfort requirements, e.g. in the consumer goods and automobile industries. In order to overcome these deficits, at the Ilmenau University of Technology a flexible audiovisual stereoscopic projection system (FASP) has been constructed. Consequently, investigations of the sound effects of machine components, machines, cars and other products as well as psycho-acoustic assessments of designed products in a virtual environment can be realized.

Competence in building more innovative ships will help the German Maritime Industry guaranteeing its existence under competitive conditions in respect to Asia. The realistic visualisation with Virtual Reality (VR) enables the demonstration of the shipyard’s design competence to the customer in an early stage as well as the discussion of design decisions and their implications between ship yard and supplier. Using the example of shipbuilding, the article shows which changes in the business processes of a company are essential for an efficient use of VR and which add-ons are necessary for a user-oriented ease of operation.

The Cluster of Excellence “Integrative Production Technology for High-Wage Countries”, funded by the German Research Foundation, at the RWTH Aachen University develops solutions to improve the competitiveness of production in Germany. In the future, production systems should be capable of independently adapting to new conditions as a result of the development of cognitive controls, e.g., for robot-aided assembly processes. The tasks of humans will thereby focus primarily on system monitoring and direct cooperation with robots. A system developed at the IAW serves as the foundation for the design of AR-based user interfaces for computer-supported planning of human-robot cooperation processes.

Developing and testing and operating complex machinery and repairing it under time pressure if it breaks down - individuals in many professions have to learn new skills. Moreover, they have to do so as quickly and as thoroughly as possible. Virtual technologies are supporting learning more and more frequently. Operations and procedures on machinery and plants are already taught in individual lessons on the virtual model. They can be repeated as often as desired without the space or time constraints of real machinery and without endangering either operator or plants through incorrect behaviour and can be practiced before a real machine or plant has been constructed.

Today manufacturers of complex investment goods concentrate on their core business and retrieve additional services from external subcontractors. Many design reviews are necessary to coordinate such cooperation. They cause high expense for manpower and for travel. In the research project “Digital Product Development with Virtually Cooperating Teams using Optical Networks” a new conference system will be realised, which utilizes Virtual Reality (VR). This paper describes the requirements and the process flow of future distributed design reviews as well as the method of solution which is prototypical realized in the project ProViT.

During the last years, marketing of products via the Internet became more and more important for both customers and manufacturers. However, most products sold today cannot be customised to satisfy the buyer’s individual requirements. Configuration functionality incorporated in current ERP systems as well as industrial product development software addresses the problem of fully automated design of products according to specification. However such extensive functionality is difficult to implement, requires extensive resources to run and a large part of its costly features offers no added value in an e-commerce context. E-commerce and the Internet in general pose a number of specific requirements as e.g. lightweight simple design, good scalability, interactivity, user friendliness etc. In order to meet these demands, a new method of configuration has been developed. This method focuses on non-automatic, interactive, user-friendly configuration of product variants based on a simple yet ...