The aim of the COSTAR 1 project was to enable the early integration of cable harness design into electro-mechanical design through the use of cognitive engineering techniques and virtual reality (VR) technologies. The project ran from 1st October 2001 until 31st September 2004, and was based on two previous projects that investigated the use of VR in assembly planning and routing of cable harnesses.

Specific objectives are listed as:

1. Generate a method to represent and deliver necessary manufacturing data from the VR interface.

2. Establish a method to represent and manage information relating to multiple cables that form a cable harness.

3. Compare and contrast virtual design task with CAD, mixed reality, augmented reality methods. This work involves benchmarking the prototype immersive VR tool with traditional CAD equivalents and other non-VR methods.

4. Validate research results through trials in conjunction with industrial user partners.

The research goals involve using the COSTAR environment to investigate a number of issues regarding cable harness design in a virtual environment. These can be summarised by considering CO-STAR from several viewpoints:

• COSTAR as part of the electro-mechanical product development process

Evaluating the role of the COSTAR environment as part of the total product development process, from original product specification to release of the product to final manufacture.

• COSTAR as a design environment for cable harnesses

This examines COSTAR as a stand-alone design tool for cable harness design. Design performance within the COSTAR environment is compared with the performance of commercially available CAD environments or other cable harness design tools.

• COSTAR as a vehicle to evaluate human factors of working within virtual reality environments

The human issues of working or moving within an immersive virtual design environment are investigated.

• COSTAR as an environment for capturing design intent

The COSTAR environment is used to unobtrusively monitor the designer at work. Analysis of the action sequence of the designer may reveal their methods of working and design intent, thus enabling more appropriate support tools to be developed.