Real Walking in Virtual Environments for Factory Planning and Evaluation

Nowadays, buildings or production facilities are designed using specialized design software and building information modeling tools help to evaluate the resulting virtual mock-up. However, with current, primarily desktop based tools it is hard to evaluate human factors of such a design, for instance spatial constraints for workforces. This paper presents a new tool for factory planning and evaluation based on virtual reality that allows designers, planning experts, and workforces to walk naturally and freely within a virtual factory. Therefore, designs can be checked as if they were real before anything is built.