The virtual factory-a semi-immersive interactive 3d environment

Designing a new factory or reorganizing an existing one is a complex and time consuming job. Factory manager and designer need a powerful tool that let them to easily manipulate the different resources, storages area and transporters. The research work, here described, deals with the design and development of a low-cost three dimensional virtual environment applied to a factory layout design. While designing the software architecture we focused on the adoption of standard and low cost enabling technologies in order to provide to the user a simple way to explore the virtual factory, built according to the layout definition provided as an input. The overall object oriented approach gives to the software the possibility to be extended and improved with small effort on the existing code.