alternatives, analyze the manufacturing process, and demonstrate a new product to a potential customer. Virtual prototyping can dramatically cut development times and reduce costs.
"The automotive industry is making serious use of VR," says Fan Dai, a visualization and VR project manager at the Fraunhofer Institute for Computer Graphics (IGD). The German manufacturers BMW, Daimler-Benz, and Volkswagen, for example, have used real-time, interactive, and immersive VR systems to design parts of the bodies of their latest cars and to optimize the ergonomics in the driver cabin.
Last year, Daimler-Benz invested DM 5,000,000 in its Virtual Reality Competence Center in Ulm, Germany. VRCC researchers are developing VR solutions and integrating VR systems and components to support the development and production groups.
Other industries, however, are still skeptical about the real-world deployment of VR. One main impediment is the high cost of immersive system
s. Another impediment is the lack of consistent 3-D data sets, because outside the European automotive and aerospace industries, 3-D modeling throughout the whole design process is still rare (see "3-D Meets Manufacturing," December 1996 BYTE International Edition).
"The lack of international standards along with high costs are curtailing the use of VR tools," says Franz May, Daimler-Benz's VRCC director.
One major problem limiting VR's usefulness in industry, according to Stefan Muller, head of the visualization and VR department at the IGD lab, is an insufficient level of integration between CAD systems and VR systems. "At the moment, it's a one-way communication between CAD and VR -- once you send your CAD data to the VR system for rendering into three dimensions, you can't send it back to the CAD system again."
The reason VR data can't go back home again is that to achieve the levels of performance required for real-time rendering, VR systems typically use only part of the data that indu
strial CAD systems generate. Thus, data that comes back from the VR system is unusable for design purposes, even though it contains attributes regarding textures and kinetics that the CAD format lacks. As a result, says Medialab's Radford, VR "is not yet accepted as part of the design loop" in industrial applications.
The Next Step
VR has gotten a great deal of play in the media lately for "helmet-and-glove" game applications, making it difficult for vendors to sell expensive VR equipment. Consequently, VR companies sell mostly computer-aided simulation tools or information-acquisition and analysis systems. The new focus of many VR developers is serving business needs.
However, in business, companies will judge VR by the same criteria that they apply to traditional computing purchases: Can it do the job better, faster, or cheaper than existing solutions? For obvious reasons, the areas in which VR is most able to respond affirmatively are in applications that involve spatial analysis or vi
sualizations on physical dimensions. VR's ability to present data in 3-D and incorporate audio and tactile information can add greatly to your ability to comprehend the meaning of data. This is especially true with large data sets.
"When we represent real-time financial data using VR techniques, it becomes immediately obvious what is happening in the market in real time," says David Hendon, sales manager at Virtual Presence, a VR distributor and integrator.
VR's move into general markets means that developers are now creating applications for standard hardware and software platforms. Standard desktop computers may run simple VR applications. This permits the use of a fishbowl interface (see the sidebar "Different Types of VR Systems"), in which you can navigate through space using nothing more than a mouse or joystick and a conventional monitor.
The release of dual-processor Pentium Pro systems, support for symmetric multiprocessing (SMP) in the Windows NT kernel, and the growing number of O
penGL graphics accelerator cards are making VR applications more cost-effective. However, high-end VR still requires the use of networked workstations or supercomputers, the faster the better.
Not Ready for Prime Time
VR vendors are facing a number of challenges in developing products that meet the needs of business users. Without solutions to these problems, VR is not ready for prime time in business.
"The main problem we have to solve today is coming up with new models for interaction," suggests Andreas Roessler, VR project head at the Fraunhofer Institute for Industrial Engineering (IAO). "We don't really fully understand yet how to interact with virtual objects in virtual worlds."
The key to solving this problem, Roessler believes, is finding ways of increasing the amount of feedback VR systems can provide to users. You might do this by adding acoustic models into systems to inform users that collisions have occurred or adding force-feedback loops into input systems such as glov
es.
Another challenge in bringing VR into the mainstream is the need to combine multiple VR subsystems into a single cohesive system. While immersive VR presents its own challenges, 3-D sound feedback and force feedback multiply these challenges dramatically. Only when subsystems are in perfect communication can you coordinate their output in a seamless way. These challenges present the need to develop communications protocols and open interfaces to permit the cofunctioning of disparate VR systems.
One step toward that future is taking place in the form of distributed VR systems. Distributed VR lets engineers in separate locations work on the same virtual objects at the same time. The dVise VR development environment from Division, for example, allows for real-time interaction by multiple users across the Internet. What's more, these users may be running a variety of platforms, from NT-based machines with flat screens, to immersive systems that are based on Silicon Graphics' high-end Infinite Real
ity machines.
Out of the Lab
In spite of the challenges, there is real progress in bringing VR out of the labs and onto
the streets
. For example, applications-oriented research centers such as the Fraunhofer Institutes have developed several real-world VR applications.
The Fraunhofer Institute for Factory Operation and Automation (IFF) developed a VR-based factory-planning system called Mowib that lets users dynamically interact with plants while a process simulation is running. With this system, users can, for example, move objects in a virtual factory and directly see the impact on the efficiency of a production process. Because of the direct feedback loop and the close combination of interactive VR and dynamic simulations, users can more easily find the best layout of workplaces and the general factory setup.
The use of VR in a factory layout lets planners capitalize on the experience of the blue-collar workers who will eventually manage the production lines
. Says Jörg Bergbauer, project manager at the IFF, "VR provides a means of getting the input of employees with substantial real-world experience but who are usually not involved in the planning process." Factory planners at Asch AG, a pharmaceutical company in Hamburg, used Mowib in a recent reengineering project to include employees' feedback in the planning stage.
At Fraunhofer's IAO, researchers developed a virtual assembly-planning system that lets automobile builders determine in advance whether new parts under development will fit together, whether workers can assemble them by hand, and whether the hand of a worker will fit in a space, given the articulations of wrists, elbows, and shoulders. A significant extension to this ergonomic planning is the use of human models with biomechanical intelligence (see the sidebar "Modeling the Human Body").
VR is also an excellent way to communicate visually rich and technically complex information. An example of using VR in marketing communications
is the
cyberdrome
, which explains complex technical issues using a virtual fly-through. Volkswagen used a cyberdrome at the Detroit Motor Show to demonstrate in detail the functioning of its new TDI engine, a high-efficiency diesel engine.
Other VR business applications facilitate the creation of optimal buying environments. Supermarket chains such as Sainsbury's in the U.K. are experimenting with the simulation of different product placements. They can thus see the visual impact of a new product before physically rearranging the products on hundreds of store shelves.
Although VR techniques and systems are being perfected in the lab and are beginning to trickle down into real business applications, they still lack wide acceptance in most industries. Today's major challenge is to integrate these VR applications with standard business software. Then, navigating in 3-D virtual spaces will be as common as filling in the cells of a spreadsheet.
Where to Find
Division
Bristol, U.K.
Phone: +44 1454 615554
Fax: +44 1454 615532
Internet:
http://www.division.co.uk
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