Functional behaviour simulation of industrial products in virtual reality

VR (Virtual Reality) is a powerful tool for the simulation of virtual prototypes, because it allows engineers to enhance the analysis and validation of the digital product before manufacturing any physical mock-up. Unfortunately, VR software tools are not able to fully simulate the behaviour of a virtual product, because they are mainly conceived to reproduce the visual appearance of the product: the functional simulation is limited to basic behaviours related to the animation of the objects in the virtual world (e.g.: part movements). This paper describes an innovative approach to create functional behaviour simulations in VR using the same models and the same software employed by the engineers in the design phase. Our approach is based on the run-time connection between the VR software and the simulators used for product design and analysis. This means that there is no need to write code for describing the product behaviour, and any modification done on the behaviour models is immediately testable in VR. It is apparent that these advantages allow to reduce the time needed to implement the virtual prototyping, thus achieving a more efficient design process.