VR for Transformative Digital Engineering and Review

As seen with the popularization of CAD in the 1990s, any tool that can reduce the time, cost, and risk for engineers to move a design to production will set the new standard for iterative design. Present engineering practices limit design efficiencies in a number of ways. During the iterative design process, engineers work on a 2D screen independently from team members and stakeholders. Their designs are shared to stakeholders and team members with limited context and collaboration. When designs are revised, old designs and their decision-making history can become easily lost or forgotten. All of this leads to a drop in long term and short term efficiency. To address this, SciVista proposes to develop a Virtual Reality Digital Engineering Software Solution that allows engineers, project managers and stakeholders to collaborate on a system holistically. Collaborating members will be able to aggregate, visualize, annotate, document, and dynamically query a single design or its entire system using one interface. Collaborators will be able to view detailed and interconnected system information at any scope. This collaboration will take place in a virtual reality environment where ease of use and immersive communication are the primary focuses. To enable these features will require an advanced data ecosystem developed by SciVista with collaborators at a New Mexico based National Lab. This ecosystem, also called the Common Format, aggregates data from multiple sources and provides a single interface for interacting with that data. The Common Format will be integrated into our collaborative VR data visualization platform, SummitVR™.  Used by fusion scientists and National Laboratories, SummitVR™ presently visualizes over 100 file types. Users from around the world can form organizations, store their data on the cloud, and join collaborative spaces to review that data under an omnidirectional movement system. By leveraging SummitVR™ and our unique access to the Common Format, SciVista will improve efficiencies in the digital engineering process with our novel software solution.