Virtual Assembly Design Environment

Virtual reality (VR) is a technology which is often regarded as a natural extension to 3D computer graphics with advanced input and output devices. One of the benefits that education reaps from VR is the ability to visualize, simulate and interact with virtual objects. This ability allows the student to have the trial and error session before practicing it on real things. The integration of this new technology with software systems for education, design and manufacturing will provide a new boost to the field of computer-aided design. One aspect of design and manufacturing which may be significantly affected by VR is design for assembly. The development of a realistic virtual assembly environment is challenging because of the complexity of the physical processes and the limitation of available VR technology. Many research activities in this domain primarily focused on particular aspects of the assembly task such as the feasibility of assembly operations in terms of interference between the manipulated parts. The virtual assembly environment proposed in this research is on mechanical part assembly of Arrick Robot.

BackgroundIt is crucial to use innovative tools to gain clinical reasoning skills through experiential learning in pharmacy education, and one of the most effective tools used in this is virtual reality. However, the lack of research that empirically demonstrates the instructional principles of virtual environment design, especially in the clinical setting, has resulted in a significant gap in the current literature.AimIn this study, it was aimed to determine the instructional design principles of a virtual environment for the clinical pharmacy.MethodThe study was conducted as a design‐based research. The data of the study related to three components of the developed virtual reality environment in pharmacy education (VRPE). These components, scenario development interface‐scenario development interface, virtual environment, and scenario, were collected through interviews, observation, document review, and a system usability scale. Instructional design principles for the VRPE were determined through analysis of the collected data.ResultsThe prominent instructional design principles of the VRPE were revealed as immersion, interaction, diversity, flow, aesthetics‐ergonomic‐universal design, informing, and retest availability. The significance of the study was the adoption of a holistic perspective in the design of a virtual reality environment for pharmacy education. In addition, one of the most critical features of the study was eliminating the expertise barrier in virtual environment design. Thus, it was concluded that the VRPE is an extraordinary tool that can be used for pharmacy education to promote experiential learning.

The design of virtual environments (VEs) can strongly influence users’ emotions. These VEs are also an important aspect of immersive Virtual Reality (VR) exergames – training system that can inspire athletes to train in a highly motivated way and achieve a higher training intensity. VR-based training and rehabilitation systems can increase a user’s motivation to train and to repeat physical exercises. The surrounding VE can potentially predominantly influence users’ motivation and hence potentially even physical performance. Besides providing potentially motivating environments, physical training can be enhanced by gamification. However, it is unclear whether the surrounding VE of a VR-based physical training system influences the effectiveness of gamification. We investigate whether an emotional positive or emotional negative design influences the sport performance and interacts with the positive effects of gamification. In a user study, we immerse participants in VEs following either an emotional positive, neutral, or negative design and measure the duration the participants can hold a static strength-endurance exercise. The study targeted the investigation of the effects of (1) emotional VE design as well as the (2) presence and absence of gamification. We did not observe significant differences in the performance of the participants independent of the conditions of VE design or gamification. Gamification caused a dominating effect on emotion and motivation over the emotional design of the VEs, thus indicating an overall positive impact. The emotional design influenced the participants’ intrinsic motivation but caused mixed results with respect to emotion. Overall, our results indicate the importance of using gamification and support the commonly used emotional positive VEs for physical training. They further indicate that the design space could also include other emotional directions of VE design.

Extended-Reality Technologies: An Overview of Emerging Applications in Medical Education and Clinical Care.

In some circumstances, immersion in virtual environments with the aid of virtual reality (VR) equipment can create feelings of anxiety in users and be experienced as something “frightening”, “oppressive”, “alienating”, “dehumanizing”, or “dystopian”. Sometimes (e.g., in exposure therapy or VR gaming), a virtual environment is intended to have such psychological impacts on users; however, such effects can also arise unintentionally due to the environment’s poor architectural design. Designers of virtual environments may employ user-centered design (UCD) to incrementally improve a design and generate a user experience more closely resembling the type desired; however, UCD can yield suboptimal results if an initial design relied on an inappropriate architectural approach. This study developed a framework that can facilitate the purposeful selection of the most appropriate architectural approach by drawing on Norberg-Schulz’s established phenomenological account of real-world architectural modes. By considering the unique possibilities for structuring and experiencing space within virtual environments and reinterpreting Norberg-Schulz’s schemas in the context of virtual environment design, a novel framework was formulated that explicates six fundamental “architectural paradigms” available to designers of virtual environments. It was shown that the application of this framework could easily be incorporated as an additional step within the UCD process.

Three-dimensional (3D) virtual environments (VEs) are collaboration platforms where group members are represented as avatars and interact in a customizable simulated world. Research from cognitive psychology has shown that it is possible to manipulate nonconscious cognition and behavior through “priming,” a well-known phenomenon in which words and images are used to activate desired concepts in participants’ minds. Our goal in this was to investigate whether priming during the task execution (called contextual priming) using 3D objects in the VE can improve brainstorming performance. To investigate this, we conducted two studies. The first used priming objects specifically related to the task topic and the second used priming objects related to creativity, in general. Compared to VEs without 3D priming objects, our results show that when groups brainstormed in the VEs designed with 3D priming objects, they generated better quality ideas as well as a greater breadth and depth of ideas. Thus, the 3D priming stimuli incorporated in a VE enhances brainstorming, which indicates that the design of VE has a direct effect on team brainstorming performance. Our results also show that target concept activation and task absorption act as the underlying mechanisms, partially mediating the relationship between the design of the VE (i.e., the presence or absence of priming objects) and performance outcomes.

The Internet and World Wide Web (WWW) are now evolving as an important communication technology and a major information resource provider for industry. This paper discusses the development and implementation of a knowledge-based gear design and manufacturing system over the Internet to create new integrated design and manufacturing environments. By providing access to an interactive web-based support system, any designer with a WWW browser becomes a potential user of this on-line design system. Once connected, the designer follows the system instructions and submits the necessary input data on the appropriate web pages. The server receives a request from a client and invokes a CGI (Common Gateway Interface) program that processes the information provided through the user Interface. The CGI parses the data and has the ability to remotely run the knowledge-based gear design system that integrates knowledge about all aspects of gear design and manufacturing and provides powerful reasoning and decision-making capabilities for reducing the time between gear tooth creation, detailed design and manufacturing process specification via the Internet. When the execution is completed, full specifications definition, geometry, kinematic-loads and stresses are determined through Finite Element Analysis (FEA) within ANSYS, VRML models of the gear pair and gearbox assembly including gears, shafts, bearings and housing are exported according to the designer requests and sent back to designer on the web browser. To accomplish this, a combination of HTML, JavaScript, VRML, CGI Script and C++ is used. Finally, an example on spur gear design utilizing a parallel gearbox design model configuration is discussed.

Although precise 3D positioning is not always necessary in virtual environments, it is still an important task for current and future applications of Virtual Reality (VR), including 3D modelling, engineering, and scientific applications. We focus on 3D positioning techniques in immersive environments that use a 6DOF controller as input device and present a new technique that improves 3D positioning performance in VR, in both speed and accuracy. Towards this goal, we adapted an extended sliding technique to VR systems with a controller as input device and compared it with previously presented 3DOF positioning techniques. The results showed that our new Extended VR Sliding technique significantly improved the accuracy for 3D positioning tasks, especially for targets in contact with the scene.

Now, the design of a Virtual Reality (VR) application is still a specialised and time consuming task. Many techniques and software tools have been created facilitating the development process. However, they require considerable knowledge of VR technology. Furthermore, modelling the behaviours of the objects in a Virtual Environment (VE) requires programming skills. For this reason, we have developed an approach called 'VR-WISE' that allows specifying a VR application at a conceptual level, free from implementation details and from the viewpoint of a domain expert, allowing non-VR experts to participate in the design of VEs. This approach uses ontologies, incorporating domain knowledge and high-level modelling concepts for describing the VE. In this paper, we explain how object-behaviour can be described at a conceptual level. We show how simple behaviours can be combined for composing complex behaviours. We illustrate the different modelling concepts by means of examples.

The availability of consumer-level devices for both visualising and interacting with Virtual Reality (VR) environments opens the opportunity to introduce more immersive contents and experiences, even on the web. For reaching a wider audience, developing VR applications in a web environment requires a flexible adaptation to the different input and output devices that are currently available. This paper examines the required support and explores how to develop VR applications based on web technologies that can adapt to different VR devices. We summarize the main engineering challenges and we describe a flexible framework for integrating and exploiting various VR devices for both input and output. Using such framework, we describe how we re-implemented four manipulation techniques from the literature to enable them within the same application, providing details on how we adapted its parts for different input and output devices such as Kinect and Leap Motion. Finally, we briefly examine the usability of the final application using our framework.

A software generated three dimensional simulated image or an environment which apparently allows for physical interaction is virtual reality. In virtual reality environment, an individual interacts with the help of specialized input and output devices. Use of virtual reality in healthcare settings is widespread. It includes facilitation in medical education i.e. surgical training, therapeutic effects i.e. pain management and rehabilitation, and lastly patient engagement with regards to planning personalized medical and surgical treatment in addition to remote access for patients. Likewise in ophthalmology, virtual reality has an enormous impact in facilitation and speeding up surgical training of residents in addition to screening and diagnosis of some macular disorders. A three dimensional monitor (LG CINEMA 3D monitor, 23MD53D, Seoul, South Korea) is being used for diagnosis and assessment of metamorphopsia. Polarizing glasses are used to create a stereoscopic effect to each eye followed by six picture test which included three pictures each for vertical and horizontal metamorphopsia.

In this paper, a collision contact modeling method for virtual reality environments is presented. Models in virtual environments are typically represented using triangle meshes. Most traditional collision contact simulations require the surface information of rigid bodies. This makes traditional collision contact simulations inapplicable for most virtual environments. This paper presents methods to model the behavior of colliding objects in virtual environments using triangle mesh representations of the objects. RAPID™ is used to obtain the approximate collision contact information between individual triangle meshes. Impulse calculations are combined with the collision detection to simulate post-collision behavior of objects. A three-point method is introduced to calculate the final resting place of objects or calculate unstable equilibrium and further dynamics of objects. These methods have been integrated with the Virtual Assembly Design Environment (VADE) to enhance VADE’s existing dynamics simulation capabilities. A series of test cases are presented and analyzed to validate these new methods.

Swept volumes are the volumes created by a part moving in space during the process of assembly, disassembly, service, etc. Swept volumes represent important manufacturing, maintainability, and serviceability data. Several graphical and implicit modeling techniques are currently available to create and represent swept volumes as three-dimensional polygonal blobs. In this paper, we present a method for generating swept volumes from trajectory data created in a virtual graphics environment during an assembly/disassembly scenario. The individual instances can be edited in the virtual environment by swept instance removal and modification of position and orientation of instances. Using a synchronous link between the virtual environment and the CAD system, the trajectory information from the virtual environment is used along with the parametric model in the CAD system to create swept volume geometry directly in a parametric CAD system as a feature of the assembly. In addition, using the synchronous link, this swept volume (not just instances along the trajectory) can then be exported back to the original virtual environment and displayed. This method can handle any sweeping trajectory and does not restrict the geometry or the topology requirement of the sweeping object. The swept volumes generated this way are accurate, concise, and can be easily processed by CAD systems.

Recent development in artificial neural networks has led to an increase in performance, but also in complexity and size. This poses a significant challenge for the exploration and analysis of the spatial structure and temporal behaviour of such networks. Several projects for the 3D visualisation of neural networks exist, but they focus largely on the exploration of the spatial structure alone, and are using standard 2D screens as output and mouse and keyboard as input devices. In this article, we present NeuVis, a framework for an intuitive and immersive 3D visualisation of spiking neural networks in virtual reality, allowing for a larger variety of input and output devices. We apply NeuVis to NeuCube, a 3-dimensional spiking neural network learning framework, significantly improving the user’s abilities to explore, analyse, and also debug the network. Finally, we discuss further venues of development and alternative render methods that are currently under development and will increase the visual accuracy and realism of the visualisation, as well as further extending its analysis and exploration capabilities.

By researching in collaboration design theory, collaborative design based on virtual model and virtual assembly, architecture of virtual collaborative design environment for assembly (VCDEFA) is presented. VCDEFA intends to aid the real time transmission of 3D virtual models and semantic about collaborative design action on geographic distributed net virtual design system, and to establish a virtual collaborative design environment which supports real-time response for collaboration operation and dynamic loading virtual models. The conception and character of VCDEFA are given. Six layers' architecture and function model of VCDEFA are addressed. In prototype system, virtual models are obtained from Pro/E system. Digital increased transmission and central management are adopted to assure the consistency of design data. Message length dynamic control technology is adopted. A prototype system instance manifess that the system has good practicability, and the architecture can satisfy requirement of virtual collaborative design.