OPENVR – Next generation virtual reality for human-centered ship design

The project has conducted studies of existing design processes with a focus on understanding how VR can be used in practice in industry. The results of these surveys have been used to establish VR demonstrators to support design and collaboration. These demonstrators have been tested by a range of users to discover how these will work in corporate processes. Due to COVID, the project has turned to shared VR experiences online where up to 10 participants can collaborate regardless of location. One of the industry partners has used results from the project in user-centered design of workplaces, concept design and sales. The project concluded that there is a need to further support the creation of VR-based interventions that support collaborative design, instead of limiting the use of VR to the visualization of 3D assets created with design tools already in use in the design process. To that end OpenVR laid out an architecture that focuses on premises of the users of the ship design process and reframed VR as part of an ecosystem of “real-time collaborative media”. Such media are (i) operating in real-time; (ii) highly collaborative with the possibility to involve several users at the same time, and a very low threshold to share content across users and platforms; (iii) support enough visual fidelity to enable a broad diversity of design tasks; (iv) populated with large 3D assets libraries of 3D models, materials and textures; (v) accessible through a variety of platforms such as screen, mobile, tablet, virtual reality and augmented reality displays; and are (vi) widely available for free or a very low price on web browsers.

One partner was successful in using VR to support a sale process, which turned into a large building contract. Through this experience, the partner learned how to better use VR to support early design processes, and gathered internal support in the organization to further develop VR competence. This case was documented in an academic paper (paper accepted, under revision). All partners experienced the potential of VR to include end-users and how VR may contribute to put designers “in the shoes” of their end-users. Their experience and reflections upon the potential of VR were also documented in an academic paper (paper submitted). This contributed to build motivation for the partners to keep on experimenting with VR in their design processes. For AHO and the Ocean industries concept lab, OpenVR has provided a fantastic space to iterate and improve on our mixed reality setup for user-centred, operation-centred collaborative design. We have been able to contribute to the development to a web-based tool developed by the US-based startup Bezel, who has implemented the majority of the requirements we have derived based on OpenVR research. We are now directly integrating these new learnings and new tools in the OpenAR project where we are using VR environments to prototype concepts for augmented reality (AR) technology.

OPEN VR is a framework for virtual reality (VR) - enhanced, collaborative, human-centred design of maritime workplaces. The framework will lead to 1) improved user and customer involvement in design, 2) safe and human-friendly workplaces 3) increased innovation, and 4) lower cost for new ships. There is a need to improve usability of ships and ships workplaces, in order to reduce human error and increase the efficiency of ship operations. Human-centered design (HCD) can help solve this problem, however, HCD are not common in Norwegian ship design and there is a lack of appropriate human centered ship design processes and collaborative mediums allowing shared understanding for all the relevant stakeholders to efficiently take part in the ship design process. We will solve this problem by introducing the OPENVR framework that combines a VR-enhanced HCD process for maritime design, with a VR system architecture specifically built to support the design of maritime workplaces. The innovation will make it much simpler to involve end users and customers in design and evaluation of maritime workplaces. The innovation have two main elements: 1. VR-enhanced HCD. We propose to use VR as an enabling technology to augment HCD process with the capacity to visualize, explore and experience the future use of a ship. The resulting VR-enhanced HCD process will make it possible to integrate VR and HCD in a cost-efficient way in industrial ship design processes. 2. VR architecture for design. The project will develop a VR architecture that includes state of the art technology to support maritime design processes. The VR architecture will support technologies that can reproduce realistically ship operations, and enable user-friendly review and modification of ship design concepts at the early phases of design. It will also include support of online infrastructure to make it possible to gather people and systems on different locations in a shared virtual world.