Cable Installation in Virtual Environments

Installation of the wiring harness is one of the most complex and important procedures in both the car and aircraft industries. In an average car, more than two kilometres of wire, divided into 200 single cables, must be installed. In addition, upper class vehicles often need customer specific adaptions, which makes adjustments to the cable assembly necessary. To reduce prototype development costs physical mock-ups are increasingly replaced by digital mock-ups. But to maximize user acceptance a simulation of cable installation has to be as user friendly as possible. In this work, we present a cable installation system where the user works in a virtual environment (VE). Although techniques for easy navigation in 3D and efficient interaction with virtual objects have been presented previously, there is no standard approach to an easy and intuitive user-interface for VEs, which addresses the needs of the cable installation application as well as the user's needs. Furthermore, we try to derive general UI-concepts from our approach, which make our approach applicable to other domains