Are you reading intelligent or dumb data into your VR Scene?

When putting together a VR scene the key component is the data you want to look at, in the case of engineering users this is the whole reason for using VR, so getting your 3D CAD data into the system intelligently is vital.

Back in the early days of VR just getting the shape into the system was a success, however nowadays a 3D CAD file contains way more information than the shape, it contains metadata about the component itself, such as material spec, supplier etc, all of which can be very useful when interrogating the model in VR. In order to make use of this intelligent data, you need to have a system, like Virtalis’s Visionary Render, that understands objects, not just polygons that make a shape. Once you have the object approach you can not only carry with it the naming conventions, the sub-assembly information etc, but any metadata that your CAD system stores. In fact, in one recent example, we showed how to have objects in Visionary Render change colour based upon an live data feed, which could be something like the date it was last inspected, so that in a huge scene with hundreds of components, anything in red was out of date.

To get objects in the scene you need to read the 3D CAD file directly, like we do in Visionary Render, and not use a dumb format or third party route. Using a third-party route like 3dsmax or similar, or a data conversion tool like Anark, or a dumb format like .OBJ, will often lose all of that ancillary data so you end up back in the stage of just getting the shape to look at. However, if you read directly the 3D CAD file, then you get all of that data coming across, meaning you can start to do intelligent VR work. It also has the benefit that when you make a change in the CAD system, you can quickly reload the 3D file and start work in VR, without having to repeat the importation steps again each time.

Having the system recognise the objects means you can start to do real design review work, such as moving objects within the VR scene and having that data exported out for handing to the CAD designer to make changes from. Or when importing reference objects such as a forklift, having that forklift behave correctly in the scene so it steers on its rear wheels, its forks only go up and down within real-world limits etc.

It may seem a trivial point to raise at this stage of the use of VR, as most users are just pleased to see the shape and textures, but as you use the system more and want to get more from the system, having objects and being able to interact with objects is the way to go!