The CODERAVI project: Virtual Reality as a Support for the Product Prototyping, Configuration and Validation

One of the research fields of Virtual Reality (VR) is the virtual prototyping. Many big manufacturers of various goods have just started to use immersive systems for the presentation and the analysis of their ideas for customers and industrial partners. In this context the visual simulation, the immersion and the interaction are powerful characteristics to improve the user examination, the aesthetic verification and the functional validation of the products. In this paper the authors aim to present a research project where it's under development a system for supporting the design process of whitegoods. In the project the VR is adopted as a support tool for the product configuration stage in order to perform aesthetic, ergonomic and usability verifications: the main idea is to save times and costs related to the prototyping phase. In order to achieve these tasks a virtual environment has been designed to allow the designer team to validate the configurations of a product and to start the ergonomic and usability validations, mainly for testing products interfaces and functionalities.