Abstract

Abstract
With industry evolution and the development of Industry 4.0, manufacturers are trying to leverage it and find a way to increase productivity. Digital Twins (DT) technologies allow them to achieve this objective and revolutionize Product Life-cycle Management as they provide real-time information and insights for companies, allowing real-time product monitoring. Virtual Reality (VR) is a technology that permits users to interact with virtual objects in immersive environments; even under constant development, VR has proven efficient and effective in enhancing training. DT integration into immersive VR environments is constantly developing, with many challenges ahead. This study aims the development of an immersive virtual world for training integrated with DT technologies to handle all users’ input using the simulator. Those were subject to a performance evaluation to understand how the application handles different input types, which confirmed the viability and reliability of this integration. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024.

Abstract
Training in a virtual environment can augment the current methods of professional’s training, preparing them better for possible situations in the field of work while taking advantage of Virtual Reality (VR) benefits. This paper proposes a cost-effective immersive VR platform designed in real-context usage, consisting of an authoring tool that permits the creation and manipulation of training courses and the execution of these courses in an immersive environment. Accomplishing a good training experience in an immersive simulation requires an equilibrium between the simulator performance and the virtual world aesthetics quality. Thus, in addition to presenting the development of the proposed training platform based on Unity technologies, this paper describes an objective performance evaluation of a virtual training scene using the different render pipelines and across immersive and non-immersive setups. Results confirmed the platform’s viability and revealed that the rendering pipeline should be defined according to the display device used. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024.