State of the art of the virtual reality applied to design and manufacturing processes

Abstract

The idea that technology can transfer a person to a different environment without any physical movement and create the illusion of interaction with the artificial environment is not new. Scientists and engineers have been dedicating their efforts to its progressive development over the last fifty years. However, most of the technological advances have been made in the last ten years, undoubtedly thanks to improvements in computer efficiency and the miniaturization of sensorization devices. Nowadays, Virtual Reality is successfully applied in different fields, such as telemedicine, robotics or cinematography. Following on from this success, the question arises of whether we are ready to apply it to industrial design and manufacturing processes. The lack of recent reviews on this technology applied to CAD/CAM, together with its rapid evolution over the last decade, have been the primary motivations for carrying out this study.

Environments and System Types of Virtual Reality Technology in STEM: a Survey

“…As VR allows users to interact in real-time, this benefit needs a computer process to manipulate the virtual world with real-time as in reality. "The changes made on the virtual prototype will have to be reflected in real time; otherwise the best visual effects produced by this technology will be completely lost" [63].…”

Facilitating User Involvement in Product Design Through Virtual Reality

“…VR applications in product development (e.g. virtual prototyping, virtual assembly or virtual manufacturing) traditionally rely on CAD systems and consequently focus on advanced stages of the PDP, such as the engineering and manufacturing phase [14] for a survey). In this chapter however, we focus on the early stages (also known as the fuzzy front-end) of the PDP.…”

Disassembly task evaluation by muscle fatigue estimation in a virtual reality environment

“…In order to evaluate assembly sequences and product maintenance process, different tools and novel VR human-computer interfaces are proposed [7,8]. Thus, VR is a new technology that creates a real-time visual/audio/haptic experience with computer systems and provides a potential way for disassembly operation simulation [9]. Most of the recent works on A/D related with VR technology focus on the simulation itself.…”