#Industry News
Virtual Reality and Next-Gen Factory Planning
How does virtual reality help design, engineering and manufacturing professionals anticipate and manage the quality of a product before it is launched?
Do digital prototypes of an entire production line confer enough benefits to warrant the expense, or are they an unnecessary luxury?
When planning a manufacturing facility, the ideal first step is to simulate and test as much as possible before investing in construction of the physical plant.
This typically requires close interaction among different departments, including shared CAD data and visualizing point cloud data. Understanding on-site challenges also is facilitated by the use of physical models based on real-world data.
Designers in nearly every industry use CAD data for architecture, construction, design, engineering and production. Jaguar and others go further by using virtual reality (VR) systems for manufacturing and engineering.
The Jaguar Land Rover CAVE
The main benefit of CAVE (Computer-Aided Virtual Environment) is that it allows engineers to examine and test the components and assembly processes of a digital Jaguar before prototype construction. Brian Waterfield, VR technical lead at the Jaguar Land Rover Center in England says:
We have to go on a journey with our designers and engineers and introduce this new technology to them. If we want to build a prototype of an interior [of a vehicle], it takes about 12 weeks, but in the virtual world we can do it almost instantly and change things around as needed.
A more complicated virtual reality application is a software system called Visionary Render from Virtalis. It renders complex VR models in real-time stereoscopic 3-D. The update rates are very high and the latency is low.
Virtalis managing director David Cockburn-Price stated that:
Visionary Render is a game changer for engineers handling big and complex data, and it allows them to get inside and interact with their data in a virtual world at their desktop and in a big display environment.
