Virtual Reality at General Motors Design Center

Since February 1999, GM Design Center has used a 3 wall Virtual Reality (VR) Studio to evaluate new design themes and alternative ideas and concepts. This paper provides information on the major uses of VR at Design Center and technical details on the changes in the equipment and layout of the VR Studio as customer needs and software have evolved. We trace the development from stacked, standard analog horizontal Cathode Ray Tube (CRT) projectors to vertically mounted digital CRT’s for higher resolution, and finally to the current use of Digital Light Processing (DLP) projectors mounted between the digital CRT’s. This last combination has essentially provided two VR rooms in one physical space -- one for high-resolution math evaluation using multi-pipe, multi-channel software and the second for evaluating 2D sketches and single channel WindowsTM based CAD/CAE applications.