Engineering Concept Design and Assembly in VR Program, Year 1

This effort will define a domain agnostic database for specifying a set of physical, off-the-shelf, plug and play parts (with reduced detail shape/CAD files). The database will include metadata, such as detailed dimensions, volume, mass, power requirement, temperature limits, etc. A VR App tool (Beta version) will be developed which allows designers to quickly realize a collaborative, model-based VR engineering environment for prototyping, assembly mockup, and visualizations for pre-phase A work. Related GSFC IRAD-supported efforts which are complementary to this CIF effort could be combined to enable integration of live hardware telemetry mnemonics and 3D design to explore potential uses of VR/AR in hardware integration and test. For example, imagine tagging the parts inside the 3D model with changing colors (red, green, yellow) as status telemetry is received for those parts. By slowing playing through the telemetry, an engineer could intuitively see the cascading timeline of failures or power surges to diagnose problems in I&T or in operations (such as thermal control).