Editor’s Pick: Immersive Environment Tuned for Engineering and Manufacturing

Dear Desktop Engineering Reader:

Depending upon your perspective, today’s Pick of the Week is something that you wish you had or know first hand to be invaluable. Everyone will surely agree that it is cool stuff.

ESI Group has announced version 10 of IC.IDO, its immersive virtual reality solution tuned for engineering and manufacturing. IC.IDO combines stereographic visualization hardware and what ESI calls IC.IDO Visual Decision Platform Software that enables you to virtually and interactively engineer, build, service and present assemblies and designs. IC.IDO gives you the ability to unify high-end visualization and real-time simulation of product behavior in or near its actual size and in operation that closely mimics reality.

IC.IDO scales from small desktop 3D installations to high-end, multi-wall installations — CAVEs (cave automatic virtual environments). My guess is that it’s terrific for a cluster infrastructure. It supports massive multi-threading and is said to be able to handle massive amounts of data in real time.

IC.IDO, ESI says, integrates with existing processes and readily connects with numerous CAE and PLM (product lifecycle management) systems. It provides support for multiple CAD systems and works with most all 3D visualization hardware and optical tracking solutions. Tailored renderers are available.

ESI describes IC.IDO as offering real-time physics simulation that realistically reproduces the behavior of virtual objects. Its user interface lets you handle and manipulate virtual objects. For example, you hold a hand-held Wii-like tool that produces onscreen virtual hands that you can use to grasp a virtual object from, say, a cart then move and place it on a machine you’re assembling virtually.

With IC.IDO, you can perform collaborative and immersive design reviews, evaluate and optimize assembly/disassembly sequences, verify resources and tooling for manufacture and maintenance and provide support for documentation and training. Its collaboration capabilities support cooperation on a virtual model between remote sites.

Version 10 of IC.IDO has been enhanced with two new modules, IDO.Illuminate and IDO.Process. The new version also offers user interface enhancements and functionality to build and manage libraries of reusable elements that can be shared among teams.

The IDO.Illuminate module provides realistic lighting conditions to your virtual scenarios. You can create and edit complex 3D environments with it. Rendering performance has been optimized for runtime performance.

The IDO.Process module sounds interesting. The thumbnail description is that IDO.Process is a process planning and validation environment. What that means is that it provides the flexibility to orchestrate and manipulate processes defined by distinct product and resource configurations, which enables interactive and collaborative planning and validation of an assembly process

You can learn more about IC.IDO 10 from today’s Pick of the Week write-up. But what you should really do is check out the three short videos linked at the end. No registration is required. They show IC.IDO in action with a CFD (computational fluid dynamics) simulation in a 3D environment, doing a virtual assembly/disassembly validation and performing service and maintenance. Each video has a sound track but no narration. They don’t need narration because, in a phrase, IC.IDO version 10 “sounds way cool.”

Thanks, Pal. — Lockwood

Anthony J. Lockwood

Editor at Large, Desktop Engineering

Read today’s pick of the week write-up.

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