Stereoscopic displays for virtual reality in the car manufacturing industry: application to design review and ergonomic studies

In the car manufacturing industry the trend is to drastically reduce the time-to-market by increasing the use of the Digital Mock-up instead of physical prototypes. Design review and ergonomic studies are specific tasks because they involve qualitative or even subjective judgments. In this paper, we present IMAVE (IMmersion Adapted to a VEhicle) designed for immersive styling review, gaps visualization and simple ergonomic studies. We show that stereoscopic displays are necessary and must fulfill several constraints due to the proximity and size of the car dashboard. The duration of the work sessions forced us to eliminate all vertical parallax, and 1:1 scale is obviously required for a valid immersion. Two demonstrators were realized allowing us to have a large set of testers (over 100). More than 80% of the testers saw an immediate use of the IMAVE system. We discuss the good and bad marks awarded to the system. Future work include being able to use several rear-projected stereo screens for doors and central console visualization, but without the parallax presently visible in some CAVE-like environments.