F2008-11-017
Visualisation Technologies within Automobile Industry -Prosperities and Challenges
Advanced visualisation technologies are nowadays applied in many processes of product development, assembly and distribution. Examples therefore are the use of highend visualisation methods to validate the diversity of variants in design - particularly the interior -, the use of Virtual Reality (VR) methods for functional validation of the entire vehicle and the application of Augmented Reality (AR) methods to validate pressing tools. By means of such technologies and suitably adapted methods, many technical processes have succeeded to accomplish an important contribution to efficiently control the diversity of variants and functions with higher maturity at the same time, and reducing the costs of expensive hardware models.
In spite of these achievements many challenges are still to be mastered. The key aspects are the arrangement of continuous processes, the further development of technologies as to experience the virtual models to a greater degree and, exceptionally, being used by human beings, to fill the technologies in new processes with life.
Regarding the processes one of the significant challenges consists in applying the available virtual and real methods in such a way that they complement one another by means of optimising quality, time and cost in departmental overlapping processes. In doing so, one of the objectives has to be that the approval of the virtual models is a precondition to create a hardware model. Particularly the maturity of the virtual results, which have to be available at predefined milestones in the product development process (PEP), has therefore to be bindingly agreed upon. An additional condition to a further reduction of hardware validation models is to provide all relevant geometrical and functional variants of a certain development phase as well as the related colour and material combinations in an easily configurable manner.
However, there is a need to further develop the virtual technologies in excess of these process topics. In fact, the systems available today are not ample to meet one of the objectives to break through the application of virtual methods - the same experience and the same commitment with virtual models such as with real ones. The supply of colour and material combinations in the product development process for example is dependent on the eventuality to compare between virtual and real patterns. Further potentials in today´s VR and AR solutions are for example missing solutions as to enable several persons to view concurrently a virtual model from different perspectives, without using further VR and AR hardware such as Head Mounted Displays.
Last but not least this shows that the most important challenge consists in introducing these new technologies and processes to the employees in the company. Nowadays these systems are used mainly by visualisation experts who understand as far as possible the underlying technology. However, for a broad use of the potentials of these technologies it is essential to enable new users, such as designers, to correctly interpret the additional or in a new manner displayed information, just as it had been done with the extensive introduction of CAD-systems.