VR Assembly using HTC Vive

Current Students: Revanth Baskar and Phillip Devreaux

Status: Current

Collaborators: Thomas G.Grubb, NASA, Ground Software Systems Branch, Greenbelt, MD 20771

The goal of the VR Assembly project is to create a collaborative virtual environment (CVE) for concept design and assembly in VR from a database of pre-defined "parts", enabling engineers and scientists to work in a shared VR environment. This could be part of a concept design or pre-proposal process.  The project will contain a data base of a set of physical primitive and off-the-shelf, plug and play parts with reduced detail CAD files. The users will be able to drag and drop the CAD files from the menu to the VR environment for design collaboration. VR assembly project will be used to collaborate, visualize, and check assembly and tool paths without costly 3D printing or manufacturing. We hope our contribution helps in developing the virtual reality assembly or prototype systems.

The VR lab has built a VR assembly environment using HTC vive and Unity 3D. We will be working on integrating the CVE for this project later. The participant will be able to enter the collaborative virtual reality environment setup on the cloud and participate in the collaboration for prototype design development which will lead to considerable cost advantages over large scale real life exercises.

1) Using HTC Vive and Unity 3D

2) Using HTC Vive Unity 3D Editor

Our developed 3D environment was converted to an VRTK prefab by adding scripts on top of the player. This allows the player to navigate in the environment and have the sense of presence.