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FROM CAD MODELS TO VIRTUAL REALITY SIMULATIONS: CATIA TO VR GEOMETRY AND DYNAMICS DATA TRANSLATION BY A VBA PLUG-IN APPROACH

During last years more and more phases of the design process of new industrial products, such as Concept Design, Design for Maintainability or DMU-based Design Review have increased the use of Virtual Reality (VR) to achieve optimum outcomes in the product design process. On the other hand whilst major CAD systems have increased the support to VR interfaces and to advanced visualization systems, using specialized VR software gives still significant advantages in terms of functionalities, performance, flexibility and customization. Even so, a standard process for data exchange between CAD modelling and Virtual Reality simulations which combines the generality of standard formats with the information richness of proprietary ones is, to date, still far from coming up. In this work we expose our approach to convert CATIA V5 models to our Virtual Reality software ViRstperson, which has been developed at the Italian Aerospace Research Centre (CIRA) over the last ten years. The software module developed to this purpose, named KinetiCAD, is a VBA plug in for CATIA V5 which walks the CATIA product tree by collecting the relevant information and 3D model data needed to generate a completely structured data-set to directly perform a VR simulation in ViRstperson.