Special Technology Focus: Designing with Augmented/Virtual Reality

The market for virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) for engineering applications has traditionally been one that everyone expects to grow, but has not yet experienced significant levels of adoption.

That is beginning to change, particularly in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, when so many people were forced to work from home or remotely. We have seen VR/AR deployed for collaboration purposes, as well as for applications like product reviews or demonstrations. The technology is also being used in service/maintenance applications as a way to provide engineering insight to field service technicians.

In this Special Focus Issue, we present new use cases for VR/AR in engineering, as well as updates on the market for this technology, and the emergence of products like the NVIDIA Omniverse platform, which leverages VR to create new ways to collaborate online.