Download Virtual Reality Applications

2 Background and goals
This chapter describes the background of this project, the problems that are supposed to be
solved, SAAB Bofors Dynamics’ current situation and their need for this type of project.
2.1 Background
During 1999 SAAB Bofors Dynamics began to look at the area of real-time simulation and
environment-animation. The idea of using VR to help SAAB Bofors Dynamics develop,
educate, market and maintain their products stemmed from that project.
In today’s product development, there are a plentitude of advanced software that makes the
work easier for engineers and assemblers. Computer Aided Engineering (CAE) has come a
long way, and in many areas of engineering today there is software that supports different
stages of the product development. SAAB Bofors Dynamics uses a CAD-system called IDEAS,
which supports a diversity of usable functions related to 3D-product design. However, a
valuable function is lacking, namely the ability to control the assembly of products. Questions
such as “Are there room for the assembler’s hands?” and “Is it possible to assemble in the
correct order?” need to be answered. I-DEAS only offers the functionality to check if individual
parts fit together. Hopefully VR can help answer the other questions.
Today’s documentation of a product consists of quite a number of folders full of printed
papers. A computerized equivalence to this documentation is of use for both marketing and
documentation purposes.
2.2 Goals
The purpose of this project is threefold:
1. To examine in which areas SAAB Bofors Dynamics need VR systems.
2. To examine and evaluate different software, Software Development Kits (SDKs)
and Application Programming Interfaces (APIs), and draw a conclusion of what
software environment that will be of most use in the development of these VR
systems.
3. To examine the VR-hardware market and formulate a requirements specification
for the hardware that will be incorporated in these VR systems.
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