User- and task-centred virtual model for product development with regard to further life phases, actors and environments

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Product developing and manufacturing companies react on the increasing global competition by raising innovation frequencies - resulting in shorter product life-cycles - and by more complex products with enhanced variability. This poses new and extended challenges on the product development process. In order to meet these challenges, more and more digital models and methods are applied in (virtual product development). These shall provide actors in virtual product development with detailed information about the product, its behaviour and its life-phases as early as possible. In order to present this type of information to heterogeneous development teams quickly and in a demonstrative way, new technologies such as Virtual Reality (VR) are utilised. Today, the development and evaluation of digital methods and tools almost entirely focus on a proper modelling of the product and its behaviour. However, in addition to these aspects the context consisting of humans and environment in each life-phase of the product plays an important role. So far, the relations between product model, product behaviour, product life-phases, the context of humans and environment and - resulting from that - user- and task-centred methods and tools in virtual environments have not been investigated systematically. These relations are the focus of the project proposed here. The following objectives are to be achieved: 1. Development of a general description for an extended VR-model supporting product development. In addition to product descriptors, this consists of the components "actor" and "environment" and only then defines requirements of implementation. 2. Development of guidelines for the creation of user interfaces that enable user- and task-oriented interactions with extended VR-models according to no. 1.