Environment based on Augmented Reality and interactive simulation for product design review

The aesthetic impact of a product is an important parameter that makes the difference among products technologically similar and with same functionalities. Product shape, which is strictly connected to the aesthetic impact, has different meanings if seen from the design and the engineering point of view. The conceptual design of shape of aesthetic products is usually performed by designers at the beginning of the product development cycle. Subsequent engineering design and studies, such as structural and fluid-dynamic analyses, lead to several design reviews where the original shape of the object is often modified. The design review process is time consuming, requires the collaboration and synchronization of activities performed by various experts having different competences and roles, and is performed using different tools and different product representations. Then, computer aided tools supporting conceptual design and analysis activities within the same environment are envisaged. The paper presents the conceptual description of an environment named PUODARSI that allows designers to modify the shape of a product and evaluate in real-time the impact of these changes on the results of the structural and fluid dynamic analyses in an Augmented Reality (AR) collaborative environment. Main problems in integrating tools developed for different purposes, such as, haptic interaction, FEM and CFD analyses, AR visualization concern the feasibility of the integration, the data exchange, and the choice of those algorithms that allow all that while guaranteeing low computational time. The paper describes the main issues related to the choice of hardware and software technologies, and the PUODARSI system implementation