Virtual reality in the automotive industry
With an in-depth look into CAVE systems
South Africa is known as the leader in Africa of the automotive industry and now
produces more than half a million automobiles annually. Cars produced in South Africa
are built under license of foreign brands however we do specialise in the development
of trucks and military vehicles. South Africa is also known for creating automotive
components for manufacturers internationally and locally.
The automotive industry has continuous pressure to reduce time–to-market and to
always improve quality, VR will help them across a number of applications including
manufacturing and design. These will be discussed in the following paragraphs:
Virtual reality (VR) is a three-dimensional computer simulation in which you actively
and physically participate. It can help reduce time and costs and help achieve an
increase in quality in the development of the product.
Design.
Car design is a process requiring continuous modification and reviews, with the
necessity to revert to previous decisions several times before the car finally reaches
production (Fiorentino et al. 2002).
This process is one of the most time consuming and expensive aspects in the
automotive industry. VR allows for the possibility of multiple teams and teams from
around the world to work together and make real time changes to a Virtual Prototype.
VR can also help in the early stages of the design process by allowing the design team
to not only imagine but actually see how the product will look without having to waste
time creating a virtual prototype.
Virtual Prototyping. A software-based engineering discipline which involves modelling
a system, simulating and visualising its behaviour under real-world operating
conditions, and refining its design through an iterative process.
Virtual Prototyping can help reduce the costs and time in the design process by
replacing the prototypes and physical mock-ups with virtual ones. This will also aid in
the simplification of the review process by not having to keep remaking the physical
mock-ups in case of errors or changes that need to be made. Virtual Prototyping also
helps in the decision-making process by helping to simplify procedures and avoid
having a bottleneck effect, which occur from the errors made in the early stages of a
products development, by making modifications in real time.
Another tool used by automotive designers is the Cave Automatic Virtual Environment
(CAVE), which is cube shaped room with the walls behaving as rear-projection
screens. In order to see the 3-D graphics generated by the CAVE, users will need to
wear 3-D glasses, this will allow users to see objects floating in air and walk around
them to get a full 360-degree view. Before the use of CAVE, engineers would normally
spend weeks or months trying to perfect the prototypes and another couple of weeks
or months trying to fix the errors found. CAVE allows the engineers to fix errors on the
spot whilst looking at the visual representation as if it was really there.
