Abstract

Ergonomic assessment of manual work processes is important to prevent workplace injuries. Virtual reality simulations can be used to carry out an evaluation of work equipment and workplaces very early on. In combination with motion tracking analyses, data on posture during task performance and product use can then be collected. However, not all work situations can be equally represented in a virtual simulation. In particular, the virtual analysis of load handling poses a challenge in simulation, as body posture changes under the influence of external load weights. The aim is to increase immersion to bring the body movements in the virtual simulation closer to those in the real simulation with weights.For building up VR simulations with different aspects of visual, auditory and haptic immersion a scheme called immersion cube is presented. In order to be able to simulate load handling in VR, the immersion cube is used to investigate how much haptic immersion is needed to obtain sufficiently good data for the body movements measured in a VR setting. The first study showed that the deviation between real and virtual executions depends heavily on the task (lifting from the ground, move while standing, lifting over the shoulder). In some tasks, virtual and real simulation are very close to one another for certain body movements and could therefore in principle be used for ergonomic assessment. On the other hand there are still movements that vary between these two forms of execution and therefore show a need for increasing the immersion.