As markets demand engineered products faster, waiting on the cyclical design processes of the past is not an option. Instead, industry is turning to concurrent design and interdisciplinary teams. When these teams collaborate, engineering CAD tools play a vital role in conceptualizing and validating designs. These tools require significant user investment to master, due to challenging interfaces and an overabundance of features. These challenges often prohibit team members from using these tools for exploring alternatives. This paper presents a method allowing users to interact with a design using intuitive gestures and head tracking, all while keeping the model in a CAD format. Specifically, Siemens’ Teamcenter® Lifecycle Visualization Mockup (Mockup) was used to display the design geometry while modifications were made through a set of gestures captured by a Microsoft Kinect™ in real time. This proof of concept program allowed a user to rotate the scene, activate Mockup’s immersive menu, move the immersive wand, and manipulate the view based on head position. The result is an immersive user-friendly low cost platform for interdisciplinary design review.
Available at: http://works.bepress.com/anastacia-macallister/11/
This proceeding is published as MacAllister, Anastacia, Eliot Winer, Tsung-Pin Yeh, Daniel Seal, and Grant Degenhardt. "A Natural User Interface for Immersive Design Review." In ASME 2014 International Design Engineering Technical Conferences and Computers and Information in Engineering Conference. American Society of Mechanical Engineers, 2014. DOI: 10.1115/DETC2014-34633. Posted with permission.