Industrial Case Studies for Digital Transformation of Engineering Processes using the Virtual Reality Technology
Fahmi Bellalouna
Abstract
The virtual reality technology (VR) has undergone a rapid development in recent years. The VR software and hardware have become powerful and affordable. Therefore, the VR counts to the key technologies for enabling the digital transformation. However, this significant technology has not achieved the expected breakthrough in the industrial engineering area yet. The potential of the VR to digitize and to improve the engineering process of industrial companies especially for SMEs is still undiscovered. This has led to a poor implementation and use of the VR applications with an engineering scope compared with other business sectors e.g. gaming, entertainments. This paper presents and discusses two case studies achieved within cooperation project between the University of Applied Sciences Karlsruhe and German manufacturers for fire trucks and systems for firefighting and disaster protection. The aim of the case studies is the implementation of VR applications and their evaluation in terms of using in the business processes of the involved industrial partner. Based on the experiences gathered during this cooperation project a CAD Data transformation process for an industrial VR application as best-practice approach will be outlined and discussed in this paper. © 2020 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license ( http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/ ). Peer-review under responsibility of the scientific committee of the 27th CIRP Life Cycle Engineering (LCE) Conference.