Trends and Perspectives on Virtual Reality Usefulness in Manufacturing

To face with market changes, flexibility, time based product and process development is leading forces and afflicting all kinds of industries in different ways and impacts. In this turbulent scenario, scientists and engineers have implemented and optimized software capable to provide images with high resolution, stereoscopic and full-sized giving a boost to the Virtual Reality (VR) world. In a Virtual Environment (VE) the user is fully immersed in a virtual computer-generated world capable to reproduce visual, auditory, olfactory and tactile sensations. Encouraged by the big interest obtained by VR abilities, the extension of VR features to process design, the Virtual Manufacturing (VM), is widely diffusing. VM enables designers to analyse many alternative configurations with a little effort and time, it behaves effectively in identifying potential problems and weaknesses in production cycles, layouts and flow. Moreover, VM is capable of realizing the product aesthetic validation before realizing the physical product’s prototype and it can also be used for training and checking in assembly/disassembly tasks and finally let engineers evaluate the ergonomic of workshops and production lines. A state of art of VR employments and usefulness in new product and process development fields has been presented in order to obtain a deep insight for future studies and applications