The Use of Virtuality in Car Development

Abstract

For many years in car development the future customer was first represented by templates. Today and in fact for a long time now CAD tools are solely used for designing a car and therefore man had to be integrated into that environment as well. 1986 the German car industry joined in a research program to produce a common man model for the use in automotive design. This program called RAMSIS has been in practical use at BMW since the early nineties. All “static” situations can be assessed with RAMSIS today including dynamic movements of arms and legs. For entry and egress and for the final confirmation, three dimensional mock-ups are tested by a number of in-house test subjects. Their body dimensions have to be known in order to compare their assessments with the customer population. Therefore we regularly measure members of the research and development center using all methods, from the conventional yardstick to current laser scanning techniques. Hand in hand with DMU methods Virtual Reality has gained access to development processes. The goal of DMU, to eliminate the time consuming and expensive hardware loops and replace them as much as possible by digital models, is effectively supported by VR techniques that speed up processes by enhancing the man-machine-interaction. There is a wide range of application fields to use these techniques, e.g. design review, assembly and maintenance simulation and training. RAMSIS is integrated in the BMW VR environment with special extensions to allow immersive ergonomic research. Mixed mock-up applications are used to have virtual experiences, to verify or to train assembly procedures at an early stage of development and therefore eliminate problems as soon as possible. New concepts can be evaluated and assessed taking ergonomic aspects and disturbing influences into account.