ESI Group announces the new version of its immersive Virtual Reality solution, IC.IDO 10, featuring the new module IDO.Illuminate to deliver ultra-realistic lighting conditions. Today, Virtual Reality is used by industrial manufacturers from various sectors for collaborative exploration and resolution of design challenges throughout product engineering, manufacturing and aftersales. The new IC.IDO 10 elevates the fidelity of decision-making through its unprecedented immersive experience in terms of realistic visualization and product behavior.
Industrial manufacturers seek innovative ways to increase their productivity and reduce potential design issues for large, complex or expensive products. They have adopted IC.IDO to perform collaborative and immersive design reviews, to evaluate and optimize assembly & disassembly sequences, to verify resources and tooling for manufacture and maintenance, and to support documentation and training.
Recently, automotive manufacturer Renault implemented ESI’s Virtual Reality solution to speed up the quality and efficiency of their design processes. Renaud Deligny, Specialist for 3D Engineering for Product and Process Design at Renault, sums up his goals: “We’re excited about this latest release and expect a lot from IC.IDO 10 in terms of physics simulation for flexibles and kinematic chains, manikin manipulation, data flow and workflow organization. Our objective, with the help of IC.IDO, is to increase the quality and efficiency of our assembly validations, and to decrease our development times.”
Unlike other Virtual Reality solutions, IC.IDO incorporates real-time physics simulation, reproducing realistically the behavior of virtual objects, such as cables, hoses and kinematic chains. This unique capability represents a definite technical advantage to perform reliable design review, and eliminate design errors from the very early stages of the design process.
IC.IDO users also benefit from an immersive user interface that lets users intuitively engage with their virtual product. The new version brings significant enhancements to this user interface, offering improved usability, agility and optimized workflows. Users can now build and manage libraries of reusable elements that can be easily shared between teams.
IC.IDO 10’s new module, IDO.Illuminate, delivers a breakthrough in immersive Virtual Reality. For the first time users are able to experience their scenarios under realistic lighting conditions, without sacrificing interactivity or reducing available features. Complex 3D environments can be created, edited and activated to directly appreciate the visual appearance, showing operating conditions more realistically, to better assess the manufacturability or serviceability of a product - for example, to assess if lightning conditions are sufficient in order to ensure safe and efficient operations. Rendering performance is optimized during runtime so users can benefit from the best possible balance between visual quality and real-time interactivity. Not only does this module bring increased productivity, it also delivers a compelling experience for customer presentations by showing the impact of lightning conditions on usability or perceived quality.
Also part of this release, IDO.Process is a new module that allows for the efficient, interactive and collaborative planning and validation of an assembly process. IDO.Process introduces a new paradigm within IC.IDO to flexibly orchestrate and manipulate processes defined by distinct product and resource configurations. In combination with IC.IDO’s immersive experience, IDO.Process addresses the demand of industrial engineers and service managers for an agile and robust planning and validation environment of their respective processes.
Today, IC.IDO is in use by numerous automotive manufacturers, including Chrysler, Daimler, Fiat, Ford, Honda, Hyundai, JLR and Volkswagen. Counted among IC.IDO users, we can also find manufacturers in the aerospace sector, including Airbus, Boeing and Lockheed Martin; machinery and tooling manufacturers, including AP&T, Bausch & Stroebel, Gabler, Herrenknecht, MTU or Oerlikon Neumag; commercial vehicles and transportation, including Caterpillar, John Deere and Bombardier; and leading energy companies including Siemens and Hitachi.
