Metrological Characterization and CAD-Agnostic Data Pipeline for Consumer-Grade XR Tracking in Functional Mechanical Design

Integrating Extended Reality (XR) technologies into the early stages of mechanical product development requires both (i) a rigorous metrological understanding of the spatial accuracy delivered by consumer-grade XR tracking systems and (ii) a reliable, vendor-independent data pipeline capable of transferring geometric information from the XR environment into any parametric Computer-Aided Design (CAD) system. This paper addresses both requirements within a unified framework. A comprehensive metrological characterization protocol quantifies the positional accuracy and repeatability of the Meta Quest 3 inside-out tracking subsystem through three complementary experiments: (a) dynamic hand-tracking along a calibrated linear rail (Lnom=850mm), (b) virtual-object (cube) tracking under free, translation-only, and rotation-locked conditions, and (c) controller accuracy at three wall heights validated against a Vicon Nexus optical motion-capture ground-truth system. A three-layer, CAD-agnostic pipeline, architected around the adapter design pattern, decouples the immersive-acquisition and data-processing stages from the downstream CAD environment. The pipeline is demonstrated with a CATIA V5 R21 adapter and released as open-source software. Over 20 repeated hand-tracking trials the Meta Quest 3 achieves a mean absolute positional error of 2.7 mm (CV≈0.40%); the relative-distance error versus Vicon ground truth is below 0.5%; and constrained virtual-object tracking yields CV = 0.75%.