Virtual reality environments are ideal for gaming, but getting virtual objects to obey the laws of nature as they occur in physical reality (viewed through your five primary senses un-augmented by computing)is a challenge for any simulation application developers.
To meet the standards of accuracy set by the regulations of a given industry, you must understand just how close to reality the behavior of your digital objects needs to be. This allows you to gauge the difficulty and time required to accurately program a wide range of changes to one digital object’s geometry and material properties.
Optis HIM (Human Integrated Manufacturing) claims to be hot on the trail of more realistic digital simulation with new software they released at GTC, NVIDIA’s GPU (Graphics Processing Unit) conference. The software, HIM 2017, is a virtual environment that weaves in video, audio and haptic feedback to attain more realism.
Their hardware material scanner (dubbed OSM2) captures reality data—colors, textures, surfaces—and sends it to the HIM software. Built on CUDA to boost Quadro GPU’s to optimize the display of virtual prototypes, HIM software applied to manufacturing could allow workers to inhabit a virtual assembly line to show new products, analyze every hand-held handle made by robot or human, and speed up design decisions by way of their shared virtual environment.
Features like continuous and discrete collision detection are accomplished by leveraging NVIDIA PhysX, an SDK with real time physics primarily used by game developers. The real-time environment supports a variety of computing devices from smartphones and tablets to expensive multicore CPUs.
It makes sense that Optis HIM would leverage PhysX for powerful simulation applications, including sound and touch. Optis GENESIS provides audio simulation in the automotive and aerospace industries and simulates exactly how real sound vibrates through the air.
HIM 2017 has some dimensional measurement tools, a tracked manikin, fully body motion capture and can simulate environments at 1:1 scale. There are ergonomics and posturing analyses tools to incorporate into the design process of a factory or other manufacturing facility.
Generally, these types of CAVEs (Computer Aided Virtual Environments) are expensive to set up, which is why they only seemed to be used by the most successful manufacturers (Jaguar Land Rover, for example).
PhysX and other features of NVIDIA VRWorks, such as VR Audio, are giving manufacturers the advantage of simulating real effects of their digital designs. “Virtual reality promotes human-machine interactions,” said Jacques Delacour, the founder and CEO of Optis. With robotics’ growing presence in manufacturing, the idea of robots on an assembly line guided by a human using a virtual reality headset does not seem too far out of reach.