Virtual engineering for design today

摘要

One of the key advantages to physical prototyping is the design collaboration it fosters. Project and process engineers, stylists, managers, and even customers can gather around a physical mockup, and opinions and input naturally follow. However, physical prototyping is expensive and is increasingly being displaced by computer-generated simulations in many stages of the design process. While cost-effective, the collaborative element so helpful to design decision-making can suffer in the new age of CAE. An emerging field that seeks to reestablish if not revolutionize the collaborative nature of engineering design is Virtual Engineering (VE), VE is a user-centered process that provides a collaborative framework to integrate all of the models, data, and decision-support tools needed for good engineering design, Using established virtual reality (VR) visualization hardware, VE is pushing the application of that hardware from interactive post-processing of computational data to virtual design, analysis, operation, and optimization.