Project description
The project has conducted studies of existing design processes with a focus on understanding how VR can be used in practice in industry. The results of these surveys have been used to establish VR demonstrators to support design and collaboration. These demonstrators have been tested by a range of users to discover how these will work in corporate processes. Due to COVID, the project has turned to shared VR experiences online where up to 10 participants can collaborate regardless of location. One of the industry partners has used results from the project in user-centered design of workplaces, concept design and sales.
The project concluded that there is a need to further support the creation of VR-based interventions that support collaborative design, instead of limiting the use of VR to the visualization of 3D assets created with design tools already in use in the design process. To that end OpenVR laid out an architecture that focuses on premises of the users of the ship design process and reframed VR as part of an ecosystem of “real-time collaborative media”. Such media are (i) operating in real-time; (ii) highly collaborative with the possibility to involve several users at the same time, and a very low threshold to share content across users and platforms; (iii) support enough visual fidelity to enable a broad diversity of design tasks; (iv) populated with large 3D assets libraries of 3D models, materials and textures; (v) accessible through a variety of platforms such as screen, mobile, tablet, virtual reality and augmented reality displays; and are (vi) widely available for free or a very low price on web browsers.
Results
One partner was successful in using VR to support a sale process, which turned into a large building contract. Through this experience, the partner learned how to better use VR to support early design processes, and gathered internal support in the organization to further develop VR competence. This case was documented in an academic paper (paper accepted, under revision).
All partners experienced the potential of VR to include end-users and how VR may contribute to put designers “in the shoes” of their end-users. Their experience and reflections upon the potential of VR were also documented in an academic paper (paper submitted). This contributed to build motivation for the partners to keep on experimenting with VR in their design processes.
For AHO and the Ocean industries concept lab, OpenVR has provided a fantastic space to iterate and improve on our mixed reality setup for user-centred, operation-centred collaborative design. We have been able to contribute to the development to a web-based tool developed by the US-based startup Bezel, who has implemented the majority of the requirements we have derived based on OpenVR research. We are now directly integrating these new learnings and new tools in the OpenAR project where we are using VR environments to prototype concepts for augmented reality (AR) technology.
