Indian Journal of Science and Technology

Abstract

The computer based visualization techniques plays an important role in the manufacturing industries. These techniques are especially useful for developing high-performance mechanical products. It allows acquisition of important information that can aid the designer in correcting and controlling the product right from the early conceptualization to the final assembly design stage. The design industry severely suffers from the productivity bottlenecks posed due to the physical prototyping. The time to market degrades drastically and the effective revenue far lessens than the expected due to late entry of the product in the market. In the present communication, emphasis is given on development of cost effective software suite for rapid simulation of the performance of mechanical systems in a virtual prototyping environment. This facilitates early troubleshooting of the problems within existing designs and to significantly reduce the risk associated with manufacturing them. The paper compares the developed software suite with the existing systems embodying active stereoscopic techniques. While the later requires a highly expensive setup comprising of Crystal eye ware, standard emitter, and stereo capable graphics card, the one reported in this paper resorts to a low cost passive stereo technique that simply requires a red blue eye ware. The main focus of the development is development of an effective low cost passive stereo based visualization technique that would run on a fairly general-purpose computer used in manufacturing industries for virtual prototyping. The paper elaborates the benefits of the low end, inexpensive visualization technique developed by the authors for manufacturing industries.
Keywords: Virtual reality, stereo vision, virtual prototyping, visualization, passive stereo, OpenGL