Aplicación para el modelado en ingeniería basada de realidad virtual

Abstract

In spite of the important advances in the development of CAD applications in the last decades, due to the lack of flexibility of their interfaces based on icons and menus, designers have continued to prefer the use of paper and pencil, especially in the conceptual design stages This situation has promoted in recent years the development of sketching applications for tablets or touch screens that allow the use of digital pens providing designers with a similar functionality to pencil on paper, but with the flexibility that provide digital tools. In this context, the launch on the market of cheap head mounted displays (HMDs) has open the window to the development of native virtual reality (VR) modeling applications to create 3D content inside a virtual environment. Most of these application in the market are oriented to the creation of free form and organic shapes. However, the 3D modeling of mechanical parts inside a VR environment has not attracted too much attention. This paper presents a prototype application that allows the user to create 3D geometry of mechanical parts inside a VR environment. The paper describes the architecture, functionality and user interface of the applications, and a preliminary usability evaluation.