Design Validation and Certification of Playground Equipments in Virtual Environment

In this paper, the use of Virtual Reality (VR) laboratory to validate design and to certify industrial product is proposed, pointing out limits and potentiality. The ISO 9001: 2000 requires the phase of design validation in order to demonstrate that the design output are able to satisfy specified or forecasted user requirements; for this reason, generally, physical prototype are realized in order to evaluate real product performances and their correlation with simulated ones. The VR environment can improve the performance evaluation on virtual prototypes, thanks to the interaction between products, functional gauges, test templates, probes and testers. A case study about playground equipments for public use is shown in order to illustrate the applicability and the limits of the proposed procedure. An original virtual grasping technique was developed in order to improve the realism of the interaction between real human and virtual functional gauges. Finally, two testing techniques were compared and first results of virtual trials are presented