Integrating Virtual Reality for Virtual Prototyping

Business process re-engineering is becoming a main focus in today's efforts to overcome problems and deficits in the automotive and aerospace industries (e.g., integration in international markets, product complexity, increasing number of product variants, reduction in product development time and cost). In this paper, we investigate the steps needed to apply virtual reality (VR) for virtual prototyping (VP) to verify assembly and maintenance processes. After a review of today's business process in vehicleprototyping, we discuss CAD-VR data integration and identify new requirements for design quality. We present several new interaction paradigms so that engineers and designers can experiment naturally with the prototype. Finally, some results of a user survey performed at BMW are presented, showing the acceptance and feasability of VP and the paradigms implemented for our key process. The results show that VR will play an important role for VP in the near future.