Nowadays future designers are required to explore different fields of engineering (e.g. basis of design and operation of machines, methodology of process design, characteristics of phases of a product life cycle, ergonomics, etc.) in order to obtain sufficient knowledge about the product, the problems of its operation and related services. Currently, there is a strong tendency to take into account the impact of a product on the natural environment. The handling of products that are withdrawn from usage is one of the big problems emerging in a modern society. One of the possibilities to solve these problems is taking into account the environmental issues at the very early stage of the product design. Authors created the methodology to include recycling requirements in the phase of design of the product with support of the CAD 3D systems14,15. In details, the method of ecological-oriented product assessment during the design process was implemented in CAD 3D environment in order to improve the skills and knowledge of future designers about environmental aspects of the designed product12. In order to enhance the effectiveness of the training of designers, authors decided to use immersive Virtual Reality (VR) technologies that are more and more often used as advanced training systems. The user/trained person can explore Virtual Environment (VE) for educational and exercise purposes5. Immersive VR technologies are gaining wider use as engineering design tools to support the product design phase because of their ability to deliver an immersive and user friendly environment that can be used as digital test-bed for prototypes of the product30. Paper briefly describes the analysis of the recycling of selected product designed in the CAD 3D system with the support of Virtual Reality technologies that were based on the recycling product model (RpM) and the agent technology12,14,15. The RpM, developed during the geometric modelling phase, includes the data necessary for a comprehensive product recyclability evaluation already at the design stage. This approach allows designer to select appropriate solutions that facilitate future disassembly and to choose materials most suitable in terms of future recycling. The analysis allows to make an assessment of the susceptibility of the product for recycling using the agent system. The agent system, in accordance with the recycling product model (RpM) that was implemented in the 3D CAD system, is an innovative tool for the designer to enable a comprehensive assessment of the product in terms of its susceptibility to recycling. Future designers (students of mechanical engineering fields) gained possibility to improve their skills and knowledge in the field of ecodesign through the immersive trainings of virtual product design for recycling. Applying the Virtual Reality technologies for training of the future designers was aimed at enhancing the effectiveness of training mainly due to immersion and interaction with the virtual environment and to explore the product before it is constructed, as well as provide learning of the environments in which the finished product will be operated. As the example of the recycling-oriented virtual product design, case study of the design of small household appliance is presented. Participants of the immersive training (students) have a possibility to design the product in the Virtual Reality and select the optimal variant, which meets all environmental requirements. Short description of the recycling modeling (creation of connections, defining the extended materials and disassembly attributes) as well as an example of recycling assessment such as calculation of recycling assessment measures or providing tips and suggestions generated by agent system is also presented

The paper presents a Virtual Reality system developed as a result of cooperation of the University and an industrial company – a major city bus manufacturer. Main objective of work presented in the paper was to obtain a tool suitable for daily work with the clients on configuration of visual features of customized city buses. A city bus can have more than 100 visible features (options), which can be changed to obtain virtually infinite configuration possibilities. Visual representation of many of these features was largely unavailable before the presented work was commenced, resulting in certain problems in process of communication between salesmen and clients. The developed Virtual Reality system allows for visual representation of the bus functions during the configuration process, so it solves many problems in the client-company communication. It is also a knowledge base of all visual options which can be changed in scope of the configuration process – knowledge from many departments of the company was used to develop it, including knowledge unknown to representatives of sales and marketing. As a result, the immersive configurator can be effectively used to train salesmen and marketing representatives in terms of technical knowledge about customization capabilities of the offered product. The paper presents shortly the overview and functions of the whole system. The system is a large, multi-modal solution built of many software and hardware components and is also integrated with other, existing systems. It allows to display high-quality images of a configured bus in real-time in stereoscopic 3D on a large screen, as well as using professional Head-Mounted Display or low-cost systems (e.g. Oculus Rift) for a virtual walk inside the configured bus, with full integration between all the visualization instances. Interaction with the system is divided into several groups of functions – configuration, navigation, animation and extra functions. Different devices are used for interaction: joystick, gyroscopic mouse and gesture recognition systems like Kinect can be used for navigation and animation, while most of the configuration and extra functions are launched using a graphical user interface, operated using a touch screen or a tablet. Efficiency of the system in the visual configuration process was confirmed by representatives of the company. Capabilities of the system for education was tested using a sample of non-technical users from the sales and marketing department, using the system and then leaving their impressions in a survey study. It confirmed high effectiveness of the system in terms of presenting variability of the product features in a clear visual way. Immersive aspect of the system was also valued very high – usage of the stereoscopic 3D and Head-Mounted Device allowed to present the bus in a more realistic way than it was possible earlier. In the near future, the system will be fully developed and implemented to use in the sales process.

Industry 4.0 forces increased digitization, production flexibility, improvement of employee competences and integration of employees and IT systems within an enterprise. To this end, state-of-the-art systems and IT solutions, such as the Virtual Reality (VR) and Augmented Reality (AR), are implemented. New systems must be integrated with the existing IT architecture, and their implementation forces the enterprise to provide network access with sufficient bandwidth to fully benefit from the capabilities of new technologies. The paper discusses the practical application of modern AR solutions in the industry, with a special focus on remote support for maintenance operations and training of production employees. Two experiments aimed determining the impact of various environmental conditions on the possibility of using the AR Remote Support are described. Basing on those experiments it is possible to determine the environmental conditions required to use HoloLens 2 AR goggles in two dedicated remote support applications.