Virtual Reality as a support for the product prototyping, configuration and validation: a case study

One of the research fields and applications of Virtual Reality (VR) is the virtual prototyping. Many big manufacturers of various goods have just started to use immersive systems for the visualization, the presentation and the analysis of their ideas, projects and products, for customers and industrial partners and also for private use in the product development. In this context the stereoscopic visualization, the visual simulation, the immersion and the interaction are powerful and relevant characteristics to improve the user examination, the aesthetic verification and the functional validation of the products. In this paper, ITIA - CNR aims to present a research project, in partnership with Electrolux-Zanussi, about a system for supporting the design process of whitegoods. The design's life cycle can be briefly summarized as: concept, details design, configuration, validation. Virtual reality can be used at the concept level to check the new ideas as well at the aesthetic and ergonomic validation level. The details designing is still a competency of a Computer Aided Design system. In the project hereafter presented, the VR is utilized as a support tool for the product configuration stage in order to perform aesthetic and ergonomic verifications: the main idea is to save times and costs related to the prototyping phase. To achieve these tasks a virtual environment has been conceived to allow the designer team to validate all the possible configurations of a specific product (different shapes of the control panel, of the buttons, different colours etc.) and, once the various product's classes has been identified, to start the ergonomic and usability validations, mainly for testing products interfaces and functionalities. The mechanical and dynamical checks are performed in a further phase using more proper and specialized tools. The virtual interface with which, in a first phase, the user decides the typology of the machine (configuration environment) by using tools like pencils, pens, erasers etc., then it becomes the environment for checking the performances, where the user can interact with a virtual, but working, model. In order to create this kind of interaction it has been important to design both an opportune interface inside the virtual world as well a different working place for the user/team that will use the application. A particular care it has been taken on the design and development of a driver to link the virtual product with the software (SW) embedded in the control panel of the real one so the virtual product works exactly like the real one. Two relevant aspects are presented in the paper: the SW design and the study of the ergonomy, human factors and usability, both of the VR environment as well of the user interface devices. The SW design manages the world's rules, the SW modules for the virtual hands, the objects, the navigation and the virtual tools. And more, it handles also the modeling of three-dimensional objects, the polygons reduction, the use of textures, of environment mapping and of bump mapping for graphics enhancement of graphics. The second aspect is the psychological aspect since it deals with the intellectual and sensorial human-machine interfacing aspects and methods. For the HW setup, the user is interfaced to the system with shutter glasses or with a Head Mounted Display, and he uses a dataglove and position trackers. A washing machine is the product used as an example to check the efficiency of the environment.