In a seminar at the Canon EXPO, Embraer’s Paulo Pires described the mixed reality market and its use in aircraft design and simulation. They have been using Canon mixed reality systems and are seeing benefits, as will be described.
In his presentation, Pires first gave a little history of Enbraer. It is a Brazilian company started after WWII. In 1969, it saw the industry moving away from prop planes to jets, and so it focused on prop planes to serve smaller cities. In 1994 they were privatized and have since grown into a global operation with manufacturing, design and service centers all over the world. Today, the company has three main business units: commercial aviation, executive aviation and defense and security.
Embraer begin experimenting with virtual reality back in 2000 developing a glasses-based 3D wall for visualization. By 2008, they were integrating virtual and mixed reality into the digital manufacturing operations.
Pires then showed the chart below indicating how the use of simulation was impacting the tradition design and manufacturing operation.
No details on the savings were provided, but in later questioning Pires said the saving were in the double digits. “Mixed reality allows the design cycle to start earlier and manufacturing to start earlier as well. This means we reach a stable manufacturing point sooner compared to the old way,” he explained.
He went on to say that they are now modeling entire manufacturing plants and allowing operators to become trained virtually to speed up the time to manufacture. This was just done on a new plant they built.
