SimMechanics

Viewing Machines in Virtual Reality

The virtual reality feature for viewing your machine requires the separate Virtual Reality Toolbox. It too symbolizes bodies and Body coordinate systems (CSs) in a special way. Use of the virtual reality visualization is presented in this section, in Interpreting Special Virtual Reality Symbols and Changing the Observer's Viewpoint.

Note    This optional feature requires the Virtual Reality Toolbox to be installed on your MATLAB path. You can use the default toolbox viewer or the blaxxun Contact viewer (version 4.4) plug-in. Both ship with the toolbox. This user's guide assumes that you are using the default Virtual Reality Toolbox viewer. The blaxxun viewer must be installed separately and works only on Windows platforms. Refer to the Virtual Reality Toolbox documentation for full information on installing the toolbox and using the toolbox viewer. If the Virtual Reality Toolbox is not installed, the option Virtual Reality Toolbox in the Draw machine using menu is missing.

Choosing the Virtual Reality Visualization Tool

SimMechanics has an invisible internal interface to the Virtual Reality Toolbox, activated in the Visualization pane of the Mechanical Environment Settings dialog as follows:

1. In the Draw machine using menu, choose Virtual Reality Toolbox.
2. Click Apply or OK. The viewer opens with an embedded virtual scene.

1. What you see in the virtual reality scene is a virtual world containing virtual objects, the bodies of your machine.

The virtual scene displays the bodies along with associated CSs.

Interpreting Special Virtual Reality Symbols

Refer to the tutorial A Four Bar Mechanism in Learning Basic Procedures. Open the mech_fourbar model from the Demos library and start the virtual reality visualization.

The machine bodies are rendered with special symbols, as shown in this virtual scene.

Virtual Reality Scene: Four-Bar Mechanism

The major features of virtual reality visualization are as follows:

• The virtual scene displays all the machine's bodies. If a body has an associated surface,
• Equivalent ellipsoid
• Convex hull of one or more surface patches (a triangle of coplanar points or an enclosing surface of four or more points)

• the associated surface is red. A line convex hull is a black stick figure.

• The center of gravity (CG) point of each body is marked by a Body CG icon,
  
  .
• The World CS is marked by a large coordinate axis triad and Body CSs by small triads. The color coding is X-Y-Z axes = RGB = red-green-blue.

Viewing Machines with Handle Graphics

Changing the Observer's Viewpoint