Breaking the 1:1 Immersion Barrier

This paper discusses a combination of techniques that lets stylists and designers experience believable 1:1 interactions with virtual prototypes using immersive environments. The intent is to replace physical prototypes with believable virtual prototypes and then use them as the basis for communicating design intent within formal or informal design reviews. Achieving a reasonable degree of “believability” and natural interaction within this context requires addressing a broad range of problems, including: perception of scale, varying frame-rates, non-intuitive interaction devices and process and data integration just to name a few. In addition to these challenges, designers and stylists want to examine multiple forms of product data including bitmaps, movies, text information and 3D data within a single visual context. This paper describes an approach for visualizing and interacting with various forms of product data within a fully immersed environment for the purposes of concept design (the phase of product design where the overall functionality and shape of the product is determined [Kraftcheck, 1997]).