Linking a game-engine with CAD-software to create a flexible platform for researching extended reality interfaces for the industrial design process

Driven by the need to develop highly complex products in short development cycles, many companies are aiming at fully digitized design workflows and continuous data and information flow. XR-interfaces can extend current CAD-functionality to allow the usage of CAD-data in more stages of the product design process. In this paper, a platform linking a game-engine and CAD-software to efficiently explore XR-CAD Interfaces is presented. An architecture meeting the requirements of research environments is designed and implemented using the unreal engine and Siemens NX. The proposed system allows to efficiently explore interfaces for design sketch creation using different hardware setups.