The Impact of Virtual Reality on the Design Process (1998)

abstract⁄Sketching, either hand or computer generated, along withother traditional visualization tools such as perspective drawinghave difficulty in correctly representing three dimensional objects.Even physical models, in architecture, suffer in this regard because of inevitable scaling. The designer finds himself cut off fromthe reality of the object and is prone to misinterpretations of theobject and its surrounding space and to resulting design errors.These are sometimes not perceived until too late, once the objecthas been constructed. Traditional tools use 2D media to represent3D objects and only manage to introduce the third dimension ina limited manner perspectives, not only tedious to construct, arestatic. This scenario affects the design process, particularly thecycle of proposal, verification and correction of design hypotheses as well as the cognitive aspects that condition the designer’svisualization of the designed object.In most cases, computer graphics mimic, through its interface, the traditional way of doing things. The architectural modelis parametricized with little regard for visualization. No allowance is made for the change in the medium of graphic representation. Moreover, effort is not made to capitalize on the advantages of numerical calculation to propose new interfaces andnew dimensions in object visualization.Virtual Reality VR, seen not only as technology but as experience, brings the 3D object, abstractly viewed by traditional means,into clearer focus and provides us with these new dimensions.Errors due to abstracted representation are reduced since theinterface is always three dimensional and the interactions intuitively made in real time thus allowing the designer to experiencethe presence of the designed object very quickly.At the Ecole de design industriel of the Faculted’amenagement, we have run tests using nonimmersive VRonepassive comprehension and another active design. This project,involving a group of 72 students during a period of six weeks6hweek, aimed at analyzing the impact of VR as a visualization tool on the design process versus traditional tools. The results,described in this presentation, shed light on the effect of VR on thecreative process as such, as well as on the quality of the resultsproduced by that process.