Virtual Prototyping of Portable Consumer Electronic Products Based on HMI Functional Simulation

HMI 기능 시뮬레이션 기반 개인용 휴대전자제품의 가상시작

The functional behavior of a portable consumer electronic (PCE) product is nearly all expressed with human-machine interaction (HMI) tasks. Although physical prototyping and computer aided design (CAD) software can show the appearance of the product, they cannot properly reflect its functional behavior. In this paper, we propose a virtual prototyping (VP) system that incorporates virtual reality and HMI functional simulation in order to enables users to capture not only the realistic look of a PCE product but also its functional behavior. We obtain geometric part models of the product and their assembly and kinematics information with the help of CAD and reverse engineering tools, and visualize them with various display tools. We adopt state transition methodology to capture the HMI functional behavior of the product into a state transition chart, which is later used to construct a finite state machine (FSM) for the functional simulation of the product. The FSM plays an important role to control the transition between states of the product. The proposed VP system receives input events such as mouse clicks on buttons and switches of the virtual prototype model, and it reacts to the events based on the FSM by activating associated activities. The VP system provides the realistic visualization of the product and the vivid simulation of its functional behavior. It can easily allow users to perform functional evaluation and usability testing. Moreover, it can greatly reduce communication errors occurring in a typical product development process. A case study about VP of an MP3 player is given to show the usefulness of the proposed VP system.