Virtual Reality Technologies for Creative Design

Abstract

Due to its immense visualization and interaction possibilities virtual reality (VR) is often regarded as the “ultimate” future technology for product development and engineering tasks. Although the majority of current industrial use cases for VR lie in fields of reviewing and validating, this article argues that VR has enormous potential to support creative design in the early conceptional phases of product development. To demonstrate this potential three sample VR systems are presented and matched to the “design principles for tools to support creative thinking” developed by Shneiderman et al. [1]. Based on this exemplary systems and related studies, it is argued that VR holds high potential to considerably support creative design and to improve the early phases of product development.