Towards Interactive Finite Element Analysis of Shell Structures in Virtual Reality

A first step towards a semi-immersive Virtual Reality (VR) interfaace for Finite Element Analysis (FEA)is presented in this paper. During recent years, user interface of FEA solvers have matured from character-based command-line driven implementations into easy-to-use graphical user interfaces (GULs). This new generation of GULs provides access to intuitive and productive tools for the management and analysis of structural problems. Many pre- and post-processors have been implemented targeting the simplifications of the man-machine interface in order to increase the ease of use and provide better visual analysis of FEA solver results. Nevertheless, none of these packages provides a real 3D-enabled interface. The main objective of this project is to join state-of-the-art visualization technology, VR devices, and FEA solvers into the integrated development environment VRFEA