Ford Uses Virtual Lab to Enhance Comfort in Vehicles

By Niladri Sekhar Nath

TMCnet Contributing Editor

 

Ford Motor Company is leveraging an exclusive suite of powerful virtual design tools to shave months off the product development process, while improving the quality, comfort and customer appeal of its cars and trucks.

 

“We’re really competitive in terms of time to market thanks in part to our digital capabilities,” said Derrick Kuzak, Ford group vice president of Global Product Development. “Using the technologies at hand to continue accelerating the development of quality products that customers want and value is an essential part of this company’s success going forward.”

 

Many of the industry-exclusive virtual tools being utilized by Ford engineers and designers are housed inside the Immersive Virtual Review (iVR) lab at the Product Development Center in Dearborn. Here, designers and engineers can evaluate early vehicle designs against a backdrop of virtual conditions and literally experience a vehicle from someone else’s vantage point before it is built, helping create Ford, Lincoln and Mercury products that provide the “perfect fit” for almost all customer body types.

 

“Ford is the industry leader when it comes to melding state-of-the-art motion capture and immersive virtual reality tools to yield a number of impressive results,” said Elizabeth Baron, Ford’s VR & Advanced Visualization Technical Specialist. “They include better visibility, quality and comfort for vehicle occupants, not to mention faster-to-market product delivery for Ford and overall cost savings that benefit everyone.”

 

Within the iVR lab, anthropometric research gathered by engineers like Laansoo is studied to ensure vehicle designs can accommodate the broadest range of customers. Items evaluated range from the obvious such as reach and roominess, ingress, and egress, to examining door-handle location.

 

The specialized tools within the iVR lab that make such wide-ranging customer evaluations possible include a Cave Automated Virtual Environment (CAVE), a Programmable Vehicle Model (PVM) and an open-volume immersive station.

 

CAVE utilizes advanced motion-tracking equipment and computer software to generate virtual vehicle interiors and exteriors at actual scale, reducing the need to build physical prototypes. Within the CAVE, designers can evaluate the ergonomics of the interior, exterior craftsmanship and clarity of views. The evaluator, for example, can look over his or her shoulder to judge whether the 2nd row headrest would obscure a driver’s view or to determine if the package tray under the rear window is too high.

 

“The CAVE offers a wide field of view with peripheral vision,” said Baron. “Virtually anything you can see on a vehicle can be duplicated, from the A-pillar to the underbody.”

 

Before the digital explosion, an interior design team would build a stationary three-dimensional physical buck to evaluate items such as seating positions, headroom and steering wheel angle. This buck lacked the flexibility to accommodate multiple design iterations during the evolution of a vehicle program — meaning that each round of design changes required either modifications to the existing buck or the construction of a new one, adding time and cost to a product’s development.

 

In the open-volume station, an operator, outfitted with a special headset and gloves, can immediately be immersed in a computer-generated virtual vehicle interior or exterior environment – complete with accurate depth perception — and be asked to perform certain tasks such as closing a liftgate or decklid.

 

In the case of the Lincoln MKS, the open-volume station was used to test multiple iterations of the sedan’s centerstack at varying eye points, looking for the best possible placement of controls and displays for visibility, obscuration, find-ability and reach-ability.