I came into contact with VR relatively early.
I remember that as early as around 2001, a Swedish company proposed cooperation with the Shanghai Municipal Government in the field of virtual reality during an exchange of visits with the Shanghai Municipal Government. Later, the Shanghai Municipal Government invited several large state-owned enterprises in Shanghai, including automobiles, ships, aircraft, etc., to discuss the matter. I participated in this meeting as a representative of the automobile industry.
In 2003, I started to officially build and use VR at work. Due to work reasons, it is mainly the application of VR in the field of styling design review. So the VR software that I focused on at that time was mainly RTT deltagen, Opticore, Showcase, etc. These softwares pay more attention to the realism of real-time rendering. Later, I actively suggested that RTT increase the development of three-dimensional sense and immersion, and RTT company later improved the functions in this area. However, the ecology of RTT is not very good, and the pre-preparation time is relatively long, making it difficult to meet the rapid iteration of the enterprise's development process.
I was more optimistic about Showcase at the time. After all, it was backed by the big tree of Autodesk, and it also claimed to be seamlessly integrated with the CAS software Alias, directly addressing the pain point of long RTT cycles. Unfortunately, Showcase was slightly inferior to RTT in terms of rendering quality.
However, these softwares focus on "visual effects" and do not seem to pay much attention to "interaction". This reduces the number of application scenarios.
At that time, I had always wanted to promote the application of VR in the engineering field, but I had never found a suitable scenario.
If I want to try my hand in the field of virtual assembly, the engineers say, I have Vis Mockup; if I want to try it in the field of CAE analysis, the engineers say, I have Ensight. As for immersion and interactivity, it’s just so so.
I have not given up, I still want to use VR technology to increase the utilization value of digital assets, so I have made some efforts.
For example, it cooperates with the National Virtual Reality Laboratory of Shanghai Jiao Tong University to explore digital wind tunnels in virtual reality environments. The original intention of the project is to use the vehicle dynamics analysis results analyzed by CAE engineers using fluent to use VR to simulate the movement changes of the air flow under different wind forces and different body shapes. Unfortunately, I only did a research project and could not go further due to funding reasons.
Later, I saw the promotion of Virtools, which was said to be very mature in the field of virtual assembly. I tried to use Virtools and did a few small projects, but in the end nothing big happened. Later, virtools was bought by Dassault, and I turned around and left.
A few years later, I also left the VR team due to work reasons and turned to work on product launches and the company's digital transformation. But my personal interest in VR has never disappeared.
Years have changed, and I used some VR software in the past, but now I rarely use it.
Nowadays, I am talking about being a teenager, and I hope that with the help of Unity3D, VR and I will become friends again, and we can go to the end of the world together side by side.