The Issue of Virtual Reality in Industrial Design: a Discussion on Its Adoption and New Possible Approaches

Abstract

Introduction The matter of Virtual Reality as a breakthrough technology in the design and engineering domains has recently become an interesting topic within the research community. In fact, in the current state, hardware and software tools have become widely available on the market, they are generally easily a ordable and have reached a decent level of optimization to be integrated into the design development work ow. Despite this, when considering industrial design and the complex shape generation methods needed for everyday products as well as in the automotive/transportation elds, the industry seems quite reluctant to embrace these new possibilities, sticking with traditional approaches that are deemed as more reliable. The reasons behind this mismatch are several. There are still some technological limitations that set more analog methods apart. For instance, we are still far from achieving a realistic feel of touch in Virtual Reality environments, though many e orts are also going in this direction [4]. The relevance of this aspect cannot be overlooked, given its importance in relation to some very common techniques such as physical clay modeling. As a result, many di erent approaches that have taken advantage of Virtual Reality have been investigated at research level in the last decade, and while few have actually turned into commercial successes, each contributed to pave the way in the current direction. However, the novelty of such a breakthrough technology also meant that interaction systems and user experiences in general had to be rethought from the ground up compared to traditional desktop solutions, which in turn have reached a very established level of con gurability in these regards. This aspect is enticing and yet critical at the same time: it is now possible to reimagine the user experience in ways that weren't even conceivable until a few years ago. On the other hand, Virtual Reality developers that are willing to invest their e orts in this domain have to face against the lack of well de ned guidelines, protocols and assessment methods to properly understand the actual potential of such solutions.