Dynamic simulation of virtual prototypes in immersive environment

Virtual Reality (VR) became a very common mean during the development of the industrial products. One of the main applications of VR in the industrial field is the validation of Virtual Prototypes (VP). The user of the VR application can interact with the Virtual Prototype in a very natural way. A virtual prototype should be able to reproduce, as realistically as possible, the behaviour of the product from any point of view. In this paper we propose an unexploited approach to the simulation of a VP in VR. A high level software library for the inter-process communication (IPC) has been developed to let the multi-body solver communicate with the VR environment. Such approach allows the designer to use different software frameworks for the simulation and the visualisation. The test case provided regards an excavator machine. It is possible to simulate the action of the actuators to move arms and bucket, and also perform visibility analyses discovering the viewing volume of the operator.