Being There

Automotive Manufacturing & Production, Dec, 2000 by Gary S. Vasilash

To talk about leveraging global resources is one thing. To effectively do it is quite another. VR can be a powerful lever.

The clay model is there. Which means that it is in one place. But GM is doing global product development. There are designers in different time zones. The temporal part can be dealt with (by having some people working at odd hours). The spatial part is not readily handled. If the clay model is in Warren, it is, obviously, not in Russelsheim, Germany. Certainly, there is the possibility of video conferencing: the model is Warren and the image is sent, in real time, to Russelsheim. But this means that the people in Russelsheim are looking at the object on a screen. Nuances are, perhaps, not noticeable. Which is not the case with the Visual-Eyes system. (Remember the six-inch cube?) GM is on track to create 19 VR design studios on four continents. "We flick a key here to rotate the model, and they see the same thing in Germany," says Don Siefkes, manager of the VR Studio at the GM Design Center in Warren. He adds, "It just blows you away.

Hitting the wall without breaking bones. Stamping metal without causing tears.

Although virtual reality provides a fairly good simulation of, well, real reality (while sitting in a simulated cockpit behind the steering wheel, when I was getting out of the chair I instinctively tried to avoid whacking my legs on the steering wheel), it facilitates views unlike any that a person would be able to achieve in reality.

For example, there is a view that is sometimes used during vehicle crash simulation. Obviously, no one is going to sit in a real car and drive it into a brick wall in order to perceive what happens during a crash. But not only could a person sit in a VR car and see what happens when that car hits a VR wall (clearly, the engineering information that is behind the simulation is such that there is useful data, not just clever animation), but they've actually set it up so that the engineer who is running the crash simulation virtually has his head in the middle of the vehicle's hood so that the perception of the deformation is up close and personal.

And beyond simulating accidental deformation, they are using VR at the GM Metal Fabricating Div. to get a better sense of what happens during the metal forming process.

Whatever the weather: viewing cars in full comfort.

Jeffrey Stevens, manager, Global Styling and Virtual Reality, Virtual Reality Center, describes the VR Center as being "equivalent to a digital patio." Which is no small thing in the world of design. The patio is the place at design centers where the car is rolled out (or if it is a non-rolling model, carried out) so that the full-sized object can be seen in the light of day, the way that it will when it emerges from the factory (assuming that it gets the green light for production). Reflections, proportions and other aspects are all there, visible.

The digital patio is in some ways more efficient than the actual patio. For one thing, the sun can be arced across the "sky" much more expeditiously in VR time than in real-world time. For another, the weather can be modified with keystrokes.