Yellow Window
Beyond Reality
This article first appeared in the Railway-News magazine, Issue 1 2023.
VR/XR for Mobility
Central to the digitalisation of Industry 4.0, production increasingly benefits from ‘digital twinning’. This real-time simulation and assessment of a virtual product leads to an improved development process for the ultimate physical realisation. The benefits to the rail industry are clear, but a lot of the potential remains untapped. Even as parties embrace digitalisation, not all improve their customer centricity or development processes to match.
Rail design expert Yellow Window shares its insights on what an ideal digital pipeline can look like to make the process better, faster and more collaborative.
What Is There to Improve?
Design is a step-by-step process that combines both analytical and creative techniques, with a multitude of decisions taken throughout. Not all realise the value of this process or appreciate well-designed products as worthwhile investments. Many rail projects that take years to build to last decades in service, could well be born out of creative design trajectories of under three months.
We also experience that qualitative or intuitive attributes of design are hard to evaluate, making fact-based decisions difficult. Thus, during these ‘three months’, the challenge is to give decision-makers the right information at the right time, with the most suitable visualisation technique, to maximise the success of this rapid initial process.
The rail design industry has long relied on computer-generated images as the only material to precede actual production. To validate end-user experience, present to the customer and test the product in real life, a 1:1 mock-up may be offered but is not always guaranteed.
Mock-ups in public transport have major shortcomings: they require a significant investment, have limited reach (user involvement) and mostly see the light as the design process nears its final stage. This makes them too late for actionable feedback with fundamental 3D changes becoming too expensive to implement.
Without a mock-up however, the preceding development processes offer limited immersion and not enough spatial information to support sound decision-making.
