Miele Using Virtual Reality CAVE for Product Design

Collaborative product design and lifecycle management is one of the use cases I've been seeing creep into virtual worlds for the enterprise. It hasn't taken off--training and collaboration seem to be bigger--but there's definitely increasing interest. German household appliance designer Miele is working in a slightly different direction: product design and testing in a virtual reality CAVE. It's not great for distance collaboration, but, according to this article from gizmag, Miele is seeing results in the form of cost and time savings.

“The number of expensive, physical models and prototypes can be radically reduced by CAVE, and this ultimately saves a lot of time and money," Andreas Enslin, Miele’s senior designer, told gizmag. “Furthermore, the development process is significantly accelerated. After all, as designers, we are working in 3-D anyway. The new technology enables us to immediately discuss the different proposals and ideas with our colleagues from Engineering or Marketing and try things out.”

Of course, at 1.6 million Euros, the CAVE system is a bit more expensive than most enterprise collaboration suites. You get a lot of hardware for your buck, though, and it does realize the dream of being able to walk around and explore new designs. That's enabled Miele to innovate more quickly and, because the prototypes don't cost anything in raw materials and can be produced more quickly, experiment. And with a streamlined process those innovations can be quickly evaluated and moved down the line.

"CAVE creates a quite different form of communication and cooperation," said Enslin. "Marketers, designers and engineers can now deal with one issue simultaneously. Regardless of what comes up with me as a designer or engineer, I am able to immediately try it and see if it works. As everyone is seeing the same thing, those people who are not directly involved in the process of development and construction can also immediately see the consequences and effects of decisions."

Also, one might think it makes product design just a little more awesome. Granted I'm not a design specialist, but this is the most excited I've ever been about the process of designing a new stovetop.

[via gizmag via VR Geek Blog]

Comments

[Dunken]

Cool. the K-12 education space also have a CAVE like system for teaching the little tykes called Edusim - google it will give a nice overview of what kids are doing in this area.

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[burhop]

There is certainly some long term potential for virtual reality/virtual worlds in product design.

Being collorative, 3D, immersive and simulation driven (i.e. physics engines) could go quite a ways toward cutting costs.

Hard part is either cost (like above) or lack of sufficient technology. Second LIfe and related virtual worlds have some potential but until they can provide for more complex geometry and better physics simulation, they are not that useuful...yet.