Exploring the benefits of the virtual reality technologies for assembly retrieval applications

Virtual reality technologies offer several intuitive and natural interactions that can be used to enhance and increase awareness during the different phases of the product design, such as the virtual prototyping or the project reviews. In this work, we focus on the benefits of virtual reality environments for assembly retrieval applications, which usually are employed to reuse existing CAD models by operating minor modifications. The retrieval system adopted to evaluate the different similarity among CAD assemblies is able to detect three different similarity criteria (i.e. shape, joint and position) at different levels (globally and locally). Considering the complexity of assembly models, conveying these different types of information simultaneously is quite difficult, especially through the traditional desktop systems. Hence, this paper presents a system for the visualization and the inspection of the results returned by a retrieval system with the aim of easing the analysis especially when the retrieved objects to analyze are complex. The proposed tool exploits the 3D space to represent and communicate the different types of similarity and gestures as well as voice commands to interact in the VR environment. Finally, the usability of the system has been tested over a sample of interviewers, who used the system and the different functionalities provided and then expressed their judgment filling out a questionnaire. The results indicate that user are able to interpret the different similarity criteria and that the gestures help acting in a natural manner.