Virtual Reality Development for Engineering Applications

Virtual Reality (VR) is an emerging technology that creates a computer-generated immersive environment to provide users a realistic experience. VR has been applied to an increasing number of fields across different disciplines. Considerable progress has been made to apply VR to the engineering field, allowing the user to interpret data. However, the implementation of VR in complex simulation applications requires further and specific developments to more effectively and efficiently visualize the numerical models. The present study focuses on developing a solution to convert and visualize simulation results as well as constructing virtual engineering processes for industrial training in a VR system. By integrating and customizing multiple software packages, several functionalities have been designed and introduced to the VR package for interactive visualization. The newly developed integration of VR and engineering simulation has provided an efficient means of visualizing and analyzing huge amounts of numerical data in a virtual environment. This integration offers a technology to aid the design and optimization of industrial processes by empowering people to work collaboratively and intuitively to reduce design time for better engineering solutions. The VR based applications provide a virtual operating environment for the purpose of research and development as well as education and training.Copyright © 2010 by ASME