Introduction
Market demands these days tend to vary rapidly. This imposes increasing challenges on product development activities to keep pace with the market. For example in the consumer electronics market, companies in Silicon Valley are forced to reckon with a development period of only 40 days for the whole process from idea to end product. To be able to keep up with such high product development speeds, it is important that the evolution from idea to product is in no way limited by the methods and tools applied in the process. The creation of physical prototypes for example should for this reason be limited to an absolute minimum. Physical prototypes characteristically require concept drawings that are finished to a certain extent and therefore are less applicable in the early design stages. Physical prototypes also generally require significant amounts of production time and production costs. Virtual prototypes have the potency to diminish these two disadvantages. This potency should be exploited as much as possible. When Virtual Reality (VR) hardware and software are used in designated operational procedures and settings, virtual prototypes form a reliable, flexible and affordable basis for making design decisions already in the early design stages.
As an example, consider the design case illustrated in Fig. 1. During the development of a new hospital shower stretcher, the requirements for the major dimensions are derived. In this case, the dimensions are derived by allowing future caretakers to treat patients on a virtual shower stretcher in a 3D simulation of a care centre. The caretakers encounter situations that they recognize from their daily work. Based on their personal experience, they suggest height, length and width dimensions of the stretcher or adjustments to the care centre construction. The simulation then is adjusted to their wishes, allowing the users to test whether their proposal brings new problems to light.
In the example, the virtual prototype assists stakeholders in imagining how various embodiments of a future product will function in their organization. Using simple graphics to show parametric product models, requirements are verified without investing too much effort in the task. The introduction of the virtual prototype thus reduces the risk of working with false requirement estimations.
We believe that, in general, the value brought to the design process by the introduction of the virtual prototypes is highly dependent on (1) the composition of the virtual setting and (2) the context of use of that virtual setting.