Systematic Development of Virtual Reality Convergence Support Tools Dedicated to Concurrent Product Design

Abstract

Concurrent and multidisciplinary product design processes are necessary to maintain the competitiveness of manufacturing industries, but their implementation is complicated by difficulties of collaboration between experts from different areas of expertise. Virtual reality can be used as an intermediate design representation in order to ease this collaboration. Nowadays, virtual reality is already in use in the industry for product design, but it suffers from acceptance issues by product designers. In this paper, we propose the As Soon As Possible methodology for the anthropocentric development of immersive multidisciplinary convergence support tools. These immersive tools can ease interdisciplinary collaboration while providing a response to the lack of virtual reality acceptance by designers. The feasibility of the concept is then demonstrated by an industrial use case.