Design and Implementation of Multichannel Visualization Module on PC Cluster for Virtual Manufacturing

Immersive virtual reality (VR) for the manufacturing planning helps to shorten the planning times as well as to improve the quality of planning results. However, VR equipment is expensive, both in terms of development efforts and device. Engineers also spend time to manually repair erroneous 3-D shape because of imperfect translation between 3-D engineering CAD model and VR system format. In this paper a method is proposed to link 3-D engineering CAD model to a multichannel visualization system with PC clusters. The multichannel visualization module enables distributed computing for PC clusters, which can reduce the cost of VR experience while offering high performance. Each PC in a cluster renders a particular viewpoint of a scene. Scenes are synchronized by reading parameters from the master scene control module and passing them to client scenes.