An interesting claim “We developed this helicopter in just six months.”
Designed? Or developed?
I suspect that certain aspects of the helicopter were designed and developed 10 times faster.
Or even faster than that.
But then many other aspects of the development took just as long.
The video claims, and we can assume based on other statements made by companies over the years that a modern helicopter takes five years of development work
Are we to presume that the entire endeavour was truly done in just six months?
This is their claim.
I don’t think it holds water.
Yes, I suspect the cockpit layout and some of the outer skin was designed in just six months.
VR speeds up the process of that because you don’t have to “cut metal” and then assemble everything.
You can figure out “does this part of the fuselage block the pilot’s view? Should we move it back a little?”
An IDE (Interactive Development Environment), an electronics circuit simulator, a 3D printer, Maya, Mudbox, ZBrush, Photoshop, and all of APIs and frameworks and extensions, along with many other tools that we have today enable us to perform magic that 40 years ago when I started my career would have been considered next to impossible.
To quote myself, “We could not build a modern computer or even the software to run on that modern computer fifty years ago because we did not have the tools to design the tools that would build the tools that would make the computer that would let us write the software.”
VR is an enabling technology.
I think VR and AR are going to change the landscape of how we design products.
It will enable engineers and designers to create products we cannot even yet dream of. VR, like all our other tools of wonder, will allow us to do ten times more things in the same amount of time it would take to do just one thing, and yes, somethings will be done ten times faster, but our pace of development, procurement, approval, and processes, no matter how fantastic the tool, will still have certain inherent limitations until we change those processes as well.
Shout out to Unity3D at 1:13 in the above video.