A comparative study of assembly planning in traditional and virtual environments

This paper presents an experiment that investigated the potential benefits of virtual reality (VR) environments in supporting assembly planning. In th e experiment, fifteen subjects performed an assembly planning task in three different conditions: a traditional engineering environment (TE), a nonimm ersive desktop VR (DVR) environment, and an immersive care automatic virtua l environment (CAVE) VR environment (CVR environment). The effects of the t hree conditions on the subjects' performance were analyzed, The subjects' p erformance time in the TE condition was significantly longer than that in t he DVR condition and that in the CVR condition, whereas the difference in p erformance time between the DVR condition and the CVR condition was not sig nificant. The total number of problematic assembly steps in the TE conditio n was significantly greater than that in the CVR condition. Specifically, t he subjects' assembly sequences in the TE condition involved more reorienta tions than in the DVR condition. The number of difficult assembly steps in the TE condition was significantly greater than that in the DVR condition, which was significantly greater than that In the CVR condition. The number of dissimilar assembly steps in the TE condition was significantly greater than that in the CVR condition, which was significantly greater than that i n the DVR condition. Hence, the results revealed advantages of the two VR e nvironments over the traditional engineering environment in improving the s ubjects' overall assembly planning performance and in minimizing the handli ng difficulty, excessive reorientation, and dissimilarity of assembly opera tions.