Articles
Simon Jones, director of Unreal Engine Enterprise
In the last year alone, pretty much every automotive manufacturer has started to seriously explore the use of virtual reality in engineering and design, and many are already using it to help solve technical and management challenges.
It’s also helping engineers to do new things, including things you simply couldn’t do in the real world. Nasa, for example, has a virtual reality (VR) engineering model of the International Space Station.
The key to this explosion in applications has been high-quality VR technologies developed for computer gaming, coupled with realtime visualisation engines optimised to make efficient use of available computer power.
The arrival of relatively low-cost, high-fidelity VR has coincided with a rapid escalation in the need to do more with less and to do it faster. Take, as an example, the rapid acceleration in the adoption of advanced driver-assistance systems. Each new system needs a new user interface, and because it is safety critical it must be thoroughly validated. Yet there is limited prior knowledge, so there is no accepted starting point.
On top of that proliferation, it’s now a global market: is the right solution for Germany also the right solution for China? There may be 30 design options to test, with collaboration needed from specialists spread across the globe.
A great example is BMW’s new mixed-reality system, in which engineers sit in a physical vehicle buck that provides the tactile input, while the variable components are viewed in virtual reality using a commercially available headset. BMW makes the point that this is not expensive.
All that is needed is a high-end gaming machine and some off-the shelf VR hardware. The cleverness is in the Unreal Engine 4 visualisation technology, and the way that it is employed by the system developers. A further advantage is that specialists worldwide can take part in the discussion, without the need for costly travel.
Within Unreal Engine Enterprise, we are already talking to companies that are looking at how to embed VR within their engineering information strategy, with a single model being generated from CAD data to support many functions. It may help to create marketing visuals before there is a prototype, or customer experiences that pre-sell before production.
It may help development engineers look at the execution of detail areas without having to make separate desktop models. You can check the gap and flush and size of radiuses, packaging and manufacturability. And you can now do it without the multi-million pound facilities that received massive publicity a few years ago.
To help make this happen, many engineering companies are now hiring people from the computer games industry, because they bring not only some outstanding skills, but also a culture that accelerates innovation. It’s a fascinating area of technology transfer and one that brings not just new approaches to processes, but also ideas for new products and new ways to explain complex concepts to internal and external audiences.
For more information, the video at tinyurl.com/zq3wuak shows how Nasa is using VR. And
this video shows how VR is taking children on a field trip to Mars: tinyurl.com/jnjyclc.