The creation of products incorporating “customer delight” features, excellent aesthetics, fit and finish quality, and styling differentiators remains an over-riding priority within the automotive industry.
The rapid advancements in computer-aided technologies now enable diverse functions such as styling, engineering and manufacturing to work concurrently early on in the product development cycle, with shared understanding of customer expectations for fit and finish quality.
This paper discusses recent developments at Rover Group concerning methodology and deployment of Virtual Reality techniques early in the process to aid the development of new models with significantly greater level of confidence in the manufacturing outcomes.
Examples includes simulation and visualisation of surface quality defects normally found on metal and plastic parts and visualisation of quality standard.