REALISTIC INTERACTION FOR MAINTAINABILITY TESTS IN VIRTUAL REALITY

The present work deals with the development of a simulation environment for maintainability tests in virtual reality. During Virtual Maintenance tests, the realism of both visualization and interaction greatly improves the acceptance of the experience by the user, and rises the reliability of these evaluations. Looking at the improvement of the visual realism, real time shadows play a very important role whenever spatial relationship among scene objects have to be perceived. On the other hand, the key to make interactions more realistic is to correctly model the physical behaviours of bodies in the virtual environment. In this work is given an industrial application experience of a virtual reality system designed with the illustrated key features. Such system results from the integration of an open-source software and a real-time simulation engine of rigid body dynamics. Furthermore the implementation of a hardware shadow mapping algorithm, makes the use of real-time shadows feasible even with complex assemblies.