Joined
·
150 Posts
Bryce G. Hoffman / The Detroit News
In a dimly lit room in Dearborn, a Ford Motor Co. employee carefully places the center console into a partially assembled Fusion sedan and struggles to line it up with other components. Or so it seems to him.
Everyone else in the room sees a man wearing an elaborate headpiece and a harness studded with reflective balls moving inside a metal rig that vaguely resembles the outline of a car. Infrared cameras track his movements and feed the images into a powerful computer system. The computer monitors the position of every body part and displays how much stress each movement is putting on every joint and vertebrae.
It is the same technology that Hollywood used to make Gollum come to life in the "Lord of the Rings" trilogy. Ford is using it to study the way workers assemble cars and trucks on the line and identify potential ergonomic problems while the vehicle is still being designed.
The cutting-edge approach to vehicle design has drastically reduced the amount of time it takes to design a new vehicle, cut development costs and helped Ford improve quality. And other automakers, including arch-rival Toyota Motor Corp., are taking notice. So is the Pentagon.
Continued at: http://www.detnews.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20080326/AUTO01/803260352/1001/BIZ
In a dimly lit room in Dearborn, a Ford Motor Co. employee carefully places the center console into a partially assembled Fusion sedan and struggles to line it up with other components. Or so it seems to him.
Everyone else in the room sees a man wearing an elaborate headpiece and a harness studded with reflective balls moving inside a metal rig that vaguely resembles the outline of a car. Infrared cameras track his movements and feed the images into a powerful computer system. The computer monitors the position of every body part and displays how much stress each movement is putting on every joint and vertebrae.
It is the same technology that Hollywood used to make Gollum come to life in the "Lord of the Rings" trilogy. Ford is using it to study the way workers assemble cars and trucks on the line and identify potential ergonomic problems while the vehicle is still being designed.
The cutting-edge approach to vehicle design has drastically reduced the amount of time it takes to design a new vehicle, cut development costs and helped Ford improve quality. And other automakers, including arch-rival Toyota Motor Corp., are taking notice. So is the Pentagon.
Continued at: http://www.detnews.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20080326/AUTO01/803260352/1001/BIZ
