Abstract
Keywords - Virtual Reality (VR), Knowledge Management (KM), Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), Conceptual Design, Styling Process
Abstract - In the automotive sector the increasing competition is traduced in the need of optimizing design and development processes, which, in the view of the authors, can be achieved enhancing technological support during the creative design phase of the product, and through the maximization of re-use of data and internal knowledge of the company. This research has specifically targeted one of the most naïvely technologically supported stages of the product development process, the conceptual design phase. Its main contribution is in proposing an integration of Virtual Reality (VR) technology and Knowledge Management (KM) systems, so far two distinctive research fields, within the early stages of the design process. The conceptual design phase is characterized by personal creative processes carried out using traditional drawing methodologies, such as freehand sketches, and by personal experience. Previous authors works have delivered VR technology-based applications for conceptual design in the mechanical and architectural domain. In these applications Virtual Reality technology has been tailored for the exigencies of designers succeeding in preserving their traditional design approaches, such as in the Eraser Pen and in the 3D-Tape drawing. Concurrently research activities have been focusing on technology and methodology for KM with the attempt to tackle issues related to the structuring of companies knowledge. Further, within several ongoing European projects, such as Smartsketches, WIDE and AIM@SHAPE, the research community is investigating methodologies and techniques concerning the support of natural designers creativity, retrieval of knowledge and extraction of semantic information from geometric objects for the re-use of design solutions. In line with these efforts, the aim of this research activity is achieving a step further towards an integrated virtual design platform supporting product development. The objective is to integrate VR technology with an original and general-purpose knowledge management platform, which will allow peer-to-peer sharing of information among the participants during the design process. Information describing the creative design process will be accessible not only from a centralized repository, typical of server-client architectures, but also from single users repositories. The integration of highly information-rich environments, such as Virtual Environments, with Knowledge Management systems, will support not only the design creativity enhancing the natural capacities of the designers but also will allow a better understanding of the creative process through its decomposition. As far as the authors are concerned, there is no known similar approach that integrates the creation and editing phase for 3D curves and surfaces in Virtual and Augmented Reality (VR/AR) environments with the possibility of automatically retrieving 3D models and data of various formats from company repositories and local hard drives. Herein we see the mayor contribution of our research work.