Virtual Reality: which Contribution for Machine Design

We try to show how the virtual sketching can be a help during the advanced mechanical systems design phases. The title even of this work deserves some precise details:

The sketching term is to be brought closer the disegno term [8] which was born during the Renaissance in Italy. It is the arrival of paper which made it possible to the painters more systematically to use the sketch like tool of creation and preparation of the work. Gioravino indicates that “this instrument which intends to determine the idea as of its first demonstration (Alberti writes that the drawing is a uniform layout conceived in the spirit, “prescriptio concepta animo”) and grows rich by a new intellectual potential, serves the intentions well of the artists: to explain the link between the hand and the thought and to put forward a new theoretical reflexion behind each material construction. Here is how the drawing becomes disegno.” The term of Alberti: “prescriptio concepta animo” seems to us very well to reflect what a virtual sketching tool is.

The mechanical systems design implies the taking into account of parts movement. This point is that which differentiates more our work of other research on the virtual sketching. It is then necessary to seek to simulate displacements, forces, collisions between parts, in short the real mechanism behaviour.