Extended Reality (XR) provides a range of new opportunities for engineering and manufacturing companies. From new training methods to digital collaboration, XR has the potential to have a big impact, in a variety of different ways.

How is Engineering and Manufacturing Using XR

Training is an excellent example of an area that is enhanced by XR. Companies can create a training experience that suits their requirements, allowing them to train employees in a digital environment that reflects reality. This prevents disruptions to production that may occur when training someone on a physical machine and also saves money on wasted materials that are used up in training.

This is just one-way XR is being used though, there are a whole range of potential use cases depending on your needs. Since every business has different requirements, many companies are creating in-house XR applications to address them.

What is Unity/Unreal

Unity and Unreal are predominantly known as a tool for making video games, but they have a wide range of uses outside of this primary function. Since video games are a significant area where XR is evolving, these game engines have tools that are perfect for working with XR. As such Unity and Unreal have found their place in engineering and manufacturing as a way of developing XR applications. These tailored applications are powerful, but problems can arise when trying to get your CAD data into them.

Making it Easy to Use CAD Data in Unity and Unreal

SpinFire XR offers the Visualization Pipeline, an automated solution that prepares data for use in XR applications. It can create FBX and glTF files from existing CAD data, while maintaining materials, colors, and other characteristics in the new format. These files are automatically optimized for use in Unity and Unreal.

Once created the FBX and glTF files can be downloaded from our server, or our plugin makes it easy to get your data into Unity or Unreal from within the application. You can import assets into a Unity or Unreal project directly. Multiple assets can be imported into a project in this way, and arranged and manipulated in the same way you would with any other Unity or Unreal asset.

Additionally, users can upload local data to create a Unity asset. This is done directly from within Unity, using the SpinFire XR plugin. The data can then be used in your Unity project immediately, or viewed on the Visualization Pipeline at a later date.

In Short

XR is continuing to evolve in its capabilities and new uses are always being discovered. Many engineering and manufacturing companies are embracing this new technology by developing their own apps with Unity and Unreal. SpinFire XR can help prepare CAD data for use in these applications, and our specialized plugin simplifies the process. If you’d like to find out more, feel free to contact our team.

To learn more, get in touch with our team of specialists today. We’re here at every step of your XR journey.