R. Shumaker (Ed.): VAMR/HCII 2013, Part I, LNCS 8021, pp. 13–22, 2013. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2013 Virtual Reality Based Interactive Conceptual Simulations Combining Post-processing and Linear Static Simulations Holger Graf and André Stork Fraunhofer Institute for Computer Graphics, Fraunhoferstr. 5, 64283 Darmstadt, Germany {holger.graf,andre.stork}@igd.fraunhofer.de Abstract. This paper presents a new approach for the design and realization of a Virtual Reality (VR) based engineering front end that enables engineers to combine post processing tasks and finite element methods for linear static analyses at interactive rates. “What-if-scenarios” have become a widespread methodology in the CAE domain. Here, designers and engineers interact with the virtual mock-up, change boundary conditions (BC), variate geometry or BCs and simulate and analyze its impact on the CAE mock-up. The potential of VR for post-processing engineering data enlightened ideas to deploy it for interactive investigations at conceptual stage. While it is a valid hypothesis, still many challenges and problems remain due to the nature of the “change’n play” paradigm imposed by conceptual simulations as well as the non-availability of accurate, interactive FEM procedures. Interactive conceptual simulations (ICS) require new FEM approaches in order to expose the benefit of VR based front ends. Keywords: Computer Aided Engineering, Interactive Conceptual Simulations, VR environments for engineering. 1 Introduction “What-if-scenarios” (conceptual simulations) have become a widespread methodology within the computer aided engineering (CAE) domain. Here, designers and engineers interact with the virtual mock-up, change boundary conditions (BC), variate geometry or BCs and simulate and analyze its impact on the CAE mock-up. The potential of VR for post-processing engineering data enlightened ideas to deploy it for interactive investigations at conceptual stage (interactive conceptual simulations - ICS). It is still a valid hypothesis, while many challenges and problems remain. The conceptual stage during a design is inherently driven by the nature of the “change’n play” paradigm. Coupling these with Finite Element Methods (FEM) imply new solutions and optimizations in view of the current non-availability of accurate, interactive FEM procedures for interactive processing. VR is predominately used for data visualization of scientific raw data. Therefore, classical solutions still use scientific visualization techniques for large data visualization [1] or use interpolated pre-computed result data sets, e.g. [2,3] for interactive investigations. Both approaches imply a bottleneck of