Virtual Reality systems and CE: how to evaluate the benefits
Maura Mengoni, Michele Germani · Università Politecnica delle Marche (Università Politecnica delle Marche) · 2006
Virtual Reality systems and Virtual Environments represent innovative tools to interact with the digital product model, which can be useful in various phases of the product development process. They can support an early and intensive information exchange between marketing, design, process planning and manufacturing experts, allowing an easy concurrent involvement of heterogeneous competencies and interacting with a single virtual product model. However, the fruitful adoption of VR technologies implies the rethinking of way of execution of traditional design activities in order to structure new processes. But many companies lack tools and data to estimate the achievable concrete benefits, considering also the counterpart of high investments necessary for VR systems implementation. The effective evaluation of VR systems in the CE context, in terms of product quality improvement, of time to market and cost reduction is the aim of our research. The present work proposes a methodology to measure the VR performances using a metrics-based approach. First experimental results related to the method application are reported analyzing the conceptual design process and the design reviews tasks for the styling product development.