A Virtual Environment for Aesthetic Quality Assessment of Flexible Assemblies in the Automotive Design Process

This paper reports on recent work undertaken to study the use of virtual environments for the prediction and assessment of aesthetic quality within the automobile industry. This paper builds on previously reported work and focuses on the recent development and evaluation of two new simulation modules that extend an existing system to facilitate the visualisation of non-nominal product variants. The case study for this work involves the aesthetic assessment of a glove box assembly within a typical automotive instrument panel that is composed of both rigid and flexible components. The paper provides an overview of the existing system and the new simulation modules that have been developed.