Building virtual reality applications for engineering with knowledge-based approach

The paper presents a novel methodology of building industrial Virtual Reality applications with use of a knowledge-based approach. Virtual Reality is becoming more and more widespread in engineering applications. However, most solutions are immediate and not flexible, especially in maintenance. Traditional way of programming VR applications makes all the knowledge about a product or a process hard-coded, effectively losing access to it from the outside of the programming software. Besides, making new solutions without any methodology whatsoever makes the process longer and less effective. The author proposes to use general rules of available Knowledge Engineering methodologies in order to make the process of building VR applications more effective and to ensure their flexibility and access to stored knowledge, even after an application is deployed. The presented methodology is supported with practical case studies.