VR Engineering IRL

This past August we convened a Face-to-Face meeting of the IC.IDO Community North American Group (affectionately known as IDO.NAG, but really they don't nag us all that often). This meeting, hosted by Boeing Company at their Everett, WA, Wide Body Assembly facility, was our second meeting IRL (in real life) since 2018 in Chicago, when we were hosted by Caterpillar.

The community of IC.IDO users and stakeholders, represent a novel slice of XR/VR professionals who everyday apply Virtual Reality and eXtended Reality to solving REAL Engineering challenges for their enterprises. Not proofs-of-concept, not a training program, or marketing ploy, but everyday application of Virtual Reality to experience the planes, trains, and automobiles of tomorrow, today. Our users travelled from Detroit, Des Moines, Seattle, Stratford, St Louis, San Diego, Milwaukee, Columbus, and Peoria to share their insights with other professionals on how they are addressing challenges with predicting, planning, and preparing for human interaction with new products in development, whether those products fly, roll, trundle, or float there are very likely times that humans will need to interact with those products in Human-Centric Processes.

Those processes like building, repairing, or operating something need to be assessed prior to release for production to avoid unforeseen stoppages to production, breakdowns in maintenance, or damage/injury in operation. This group of VR pros apply IC.IDO to resolve those issues.

What do these engineers, designers, and managers do in VR all day? Quite often they are exploring future product designs to validate that the engineering design data represents a product that fits together properly, is able to be build, repaired, or operated by real people. This means reviewing the digital design data for:

• Product Packaging and Clearances
• Wire and Cable Routing and Clearances
• Installation/Removal feasibility and path planning
• Operator Visibility, Accessibility, and Reachability
• Process Validation (assembly or maintenance or operation)
• Tooling Validation
• Ergonomics and HumanFactors
• Workspace Optimization
• Process Captures, Communication, and Familiarization

This may seem obvious to the average person, but what many fail to recognize is that before we applied Virtual and eXtended Reality to solve these challenges, enterprises were effectively held hostage waiting for REAL PARTS and REAL PEOPLE to arrive and let those people perform Assembly, or Service, or Operation with real parts in real situations to prove that the processes were safe for people to perform with those products. Before we can approve a plane to be built we would have to build that plane, before we know it is safe for people to maintain a heavy off-highway construction machine we must build and maintain one, or before we build cars on an assembly line we would need to build the entire assembly line in parts and pilot that assembly operation as proof that we should build it. Seems backward but that was state of the art for years.

With the introduction of cost effective Virtual Reality Hardware, it is now more attainable for enterprises large and small to effectively become time travelers, who are able to teleport themselves and their teams into the future, where they can validate the future products without waiting for lengthy commissioning and construction of pre-production mock-ups or prototypes.

Engineers equipped with IC.IDO can short-circuit common product/process release roadblocks by letting them experience with plausible physical reality what it would be like to stand near their product, perform assembly or service on it, and collaborate with other stakeholders in a real example of an "industrial metaverse". That phrase is already getting a little tired as many other players keep on ideating about what could be, but only delivering vaporware or novel proofs of concept as opposed to real value.

If you are interested in learning more about IC.IDO as a tool to accelerate your product development, through experience-based evaluation of Human-Centric Processes, join us at one of our many events.

If you are an active subscriber to IC.IDO who is not yet part of the Active IDO.NAG or IDO.EMEA communities, please let us know. https://www.dhirubhai.net/groups/12047640/