Intelligent Systems Report € December € 1995 € Volume 12 € No. 12

Ford Opens VR Lab

Automobile manufacturer Ford Motor Co. (Dearborn, Mich.) has opened a major new facility for developing tools and applications in virtual reality and advanced visual engineering. Ford's new lab will develop tools for a variety of engineering design and evaluation applications, including vehicle packaging studies, design verification and a "walk-up VR station" for designers to evaluate future generations of Ford vehicles.

Ford will use VR software from Division Inc. (Chapel Hill, N.C) for human/vehicle interaction projects. In one project, VR will be used with proposed car dashboard configurations to verify instrument accessibility and driver visibility. In another project, users immersed in a virtual environment can load proposed car trunk designs with virtual luggage to determine the ease of loading a particular trunk configuration and the amount of luggage that will fit under normal conditions.

Ford has been exploring VR since 1991. In addition to using Division's software, Ford will use VR peripherals that include Fakespace's Boom and Push, Ascension's Flock of Birds and Virtual Technologies CyberGlove. The software will run on several Silicon Graphics systems, including two Onyx RealityEngine2 systems and an Indigo2 Extreme workstation.

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