Virtual Reality supported Visualization and Evaluation of Noise Levels in Manufacturing Environments

Virtual Reality (VR) provides users advanced visualization and interaction technology for designing, analyzing and exploring complex data. To address the issue of noise in manufacturing environments, we developed a VR-supported method allowing users to explore noise behavior. This method consists of an implementation of acoustic simulation and visualization for both desktop and Cave Automatic Virtual Environment (CAVE) based VR systems. It enables useroriented, interactive analysis of simulated data, where there capability to immerse oneself in the data is especially valuable. In a real-world factory, the acoustic measurements obtained essential input data for simulation settings and validation data for simulation results. Furthermore, some political and legal aspects are addressed to enhance the evaluation of results and the visualization. By using the implemented software tool, users are able to understand and investigate the noise issue in manufacturing straightforwardly. 1998 ACM Subject Classification J.6 Computer-Aided Engineering