A Virtual and Augmented reality tool for supporting decisions in motorbike design: Aprilia application case

In a highly competitive market as the today's one, the reduction of the costs and of the time to market is foundamental to maintain the competitiveness. In the motorbikes field especially, it is important to face the continuously changing trends of the market. In the life cycle of the motorbike product, the evaluation of the product design is very time consuming because it is composed by sketch selection, 3D model development, "loop" of physical mock-up realisation and evaluation/refining (usually by outsourcing). In this paper, a VR application for virtual mock-up evaluation, developed for Aprilia in the Eureka Project TWO, is presented. The system allows the design team to examine in a real-time interactive way, on a power-wall at 1:1 scale, the final virtual mock-up with all its materials, textures, surfaces and optional properties. The improvements and the updates of the mock-up requested by the team are performed virtually, thus by avoiding the physical refining, that is very time and money consuming.