Dual Reality for Production Verification Workshops: A Comprehensive Set of Virtual Methods

In automotive industry, planning of manual assembly is getting ever-increasing complex, diverse and variant-rich due to ever-increasing market demands for more models and derivatives with shorter life-cycles. In order to reduce the costs for building physical prototypes before ramp-up processes, we present a comprehensive set of virtual and augmented reality methods for real-time assessments of manual assembly tasks used in interdisciplinary production planning workshops. This novel mixed reality assessment system unifies innovative interaction concepts with display technologies from a variety of domains. True-to-scale floor projections, interactive tangible tabletops, powerwalls and head mounted displays are used in combination with markerless full body motion capture and motion controller interfaces. Therewith, production planners in workshop situations are enabled to collaboratively plan and optimize station layouts, author 3D scenes and assess product and process related topics, such as buildability, reachability, assembly and disassembly routines. An in-depth evaluation on collaborative task performance using differing visualization scenarios is presented and discussed.