Elizabeth Baron, Ford Motor Company
About the Speaker
Elizabeth Baron is a Technical Specialist in Virtual Reality and Advanced Visualization at Ford Motor Company. She manages the VR Center in Product Development, and provides immersive virtual reality evaluation systems used for industrial design and product development.
Elizabeth is part of the Digital Innovation Group at Ford. Her goal is to deploy immersive systems at Ford that address the unique challenges of automotive design and engineering. She has led the development of several VR systems for vehicle development that satisfy evaluation criteria for engineering, packaging and aesthetic design of vehicle interiors and exteriors by allowing different disciplines in product development to communicate in a common environment.
She has created a Virtual Environment which augments a physical scalable vehicle model with virtual data to evaluate discrete vehicle exterior and interior alternatives, with animated scalable characters and animated vehicles.
Elizabeth began her career at Ford in 1988 working as a developer for Ford's product design software, later specializing in visualization and solid modeling software. She has conducted research within Ford on the best use of VR tools for customer clinics and marketing and engineering.
Elizabeth has a B.S. in Computer Science from Eastern Michigan University, and is a Qualified Six Sigma Black Belt. She is a member of the Human Motion Simulation Consortium at the University of Michigan, the Society of Automotive Engineers, IEEE and ACM.