Case study
Case New Holland
VIRTUAL INTERACTIVE DESIGN REVIEWS AT CNH
CASE NEW HOLLAND (CNH), a leading agricultural and construction equipment Company, has four integrated Virtual Reality (VR) ActiveWall systems from Virtalis. They are situated in Zedelgem, Belgium, Lancaster, PA, Burr Ridge, IL and Modena, Italy. CNH is part of the Fiat Group and Virtalis has installed several immersive ActiveWorks systems at Elasis, Fiat’s research organisation over the past decade.
“We use our virtual reality systems on a daily basis to conduct collaborative design reviews. The fact that we’ve now managed to link up our teams with their international colleagues, has led to a great deal less international travel and accelerated development schedules."
Kezhun Li, Head of Digital Prototyping and Simulation (DP&S)
THE CHALLENGE: finding the way through the technological maze
When CNH began investigating advanced visualisation and its associated technologies, it sought guidance from other parts of the Fiat Group as well as Virtalis. Gennaro Monacelli, manager at Elasis in Italy, takes up the story: “Our VR development has always been supported by Virtalis. We created some demos to help CNH’s managers to better understand the potentialities of VR technologies in their product development process. Following Elasis’ recommendation, CNH selected Virtalis as the technical partner for the system’s integration.”
THE VIRTALIS SOLUTION
All four Virtalis ActiveWall systems have very similar specifications that enable efficient collaborative working between them. The Virtalis ActiveWall HD configuration boasts a massive 25ft by 14ft screen which has been slightly sunken into the floor so that the combine harvesters and balers can drive out of the wall in full stereoscopic 3D, powered by a Christie Mirage HD18 projector. The standard ActiveWall has an 18ft by 14ft screen and uses a Mirage S+14k projector. Virtalis implemented tailored Intersense IS900 Wired VETracker systems, so that natural movement around the virtual models is maximised.
The ActiveSpace systems use nVisor SX Head-Mounted Displays from NVIS. Since the virtual models CNH creates have more than 20,000 parts, compute power and graphics rendering capability are vital. The latest Virtalis systems at CNH feature 64-bit, quad-core [Dell] workstations coupled with NVIDIA FX5600 graphics cards.
“We are proud to report that we are using our new system to its fullest extent. We are using the tracking system for interactive design reviews and design concept evaluations. Our ActiveSpace is proving invaluable for cab visibility tests, while we are using our Cyberglove for reachability studies. All three pieces of kit work together reliably and in many combinations. The integration is seamless and the whole system was reasonably priced.”
Kezhun Li, Head of DP&S
