A Siemens Xcelerator story with SONY | Transforming product design with Immersive Engineering

By Jamie Tyler

Immersive Engineering is here to stay, revolutionizing the way in which companies design products for the future. Built on an exclusive partnership with SONY, we’re combining the real and digital worlds to enable precise 3D interaction, stunning visual fidelity and seamless collaboration. The partnership leverages the Siemens Xcelerator portfolio, alongside Sony’s award winning XR head-mounted display.

But what was the rationale behind creating an integrated, game-changing solution? You’ll find all the answers in this blog and accompanying video.

Setting the scene

In 2010, like all global companies, there was a desire from SONY to work more efficiently by breaking down organizational silos. There was a real recognition internally that innovation was impacted, resulting in sub-optimal leads times, affecting the companies competitiveness.

The goal was to implement a company-wide technology and personnel exchange initiatives, leading to the establishment of a cross-company mechanical strategy committee. The committee identified the need for all CAD processes to be standardized.

Previously, different CAD systems were used for each category, bringing their own unique challenges. This scatter-gun approach meant data translation was a big issue, leading to a massive loss in production time.

The answer for SONY

SONY chose to implement Designcenter NX across the whole company, leading to a 25% improvement in efficiency. The need for data translation tasks reduced almost instantaneously, leaving engineers more time to focus on the design decisions that matter the most.

But SONY wanted to take it further. Conventional design validation process relies heavily on iterative physical prototyping, leading to increased development time and cost. So, SONY approached Siemens to work on a solution that allows customers to create 3D CAD data in an immersive environment.

The goal was simple; to leverage SONY’s expertise in hardware creation with Siemens’ game changing software to reduce production time in a way never seen before. And this is how Immersive Engineering was born.

By upgrading to Designcenter NX version 2412 and adopting Immersive Designer through value-based licensing, we enabled high-fidelity, real-time evaluation of design intent, significantly reducing the dependency on physical prototypes

Seiya Amatatsu, Deputy head of technology center, SONY corporation