CAD to VR – A Methodology for the Automated Conversion of Kinematic CAD Models to Virtual Reality

Abstract

Driven by the challenges of Industry 4.0 seamless data integration and conversion becomes an even more pressing topic than it already has been in the past. In this context virtual technologies such as Virtual Reality (VR) and Augmented Reality (AR) will play a defining role when it comes down to speed up the development process of new products, factory planning and supporting the workforce with novel intelligent assistance systems to keep up with the faster growing product diversity, especially in the face of the demographic challenge. The key enabling technology to foster this development is the seamless and automated integration of all product data defined in the CAD systems into VR/AR systems. Currently, there is still a major gap in this data integration when more than just plain geometry should be transferred, especially outside of the software ecosphere of a CAD system provider. Considerable effort by VR experts has to be put in to reduce the use case specific complexity of models and to rebuild the already in the CAD system defined kinematic mechanisms and animation. Whilst these obstacles were hindering SMEs in the past to participate of the benefits that virtual technologies provide, this cannot be afforded any longer. In this paper we will outline a CAD and VR system independent workflow for an automated model complexity reduction, animation and kinematic mechanism adoption. We do this by defining light weighted system interfaces and showing solution concepts for each area of the conversion problem. Finally, we verify the presented method on a proof of concept implementation.