Using virtual reality to orient parts for additive manufacturing and its effects on manufacturability and experiential outcomes

Additive manufacturing (AM) enables the fabrication of geometrically complex designs through layer-by-layer joining of material along single or multiple directions. To determine favorable design and manufacturing solutions, designers must navigate this 3D spatial complexity while ensuring the functionality and manufacturability of their designs. Evaluating the manufacturability of their solutions necessitates modalities that help naturally visualize AM processes and the designs enabled by them. Digitally non-immersive visualization can reduce this expense, but digital immersion has the potential to further improve the experience before building. This research investigates how differences in immersion between computer-aided (CAx) and virtual reality (VR) environments affect a designer’s approach to solving a build-with-AM (BAM) problem and its outcomes. First, it studies how immersion affects determining favorable build orientations when considering the additive manufacturability outcomes of designs of varying complexity. Second, it studies how immersion affects the participants’ experiential outcomes, including evaluation time, attempts made, and cognitive load when solving the BAM problem. Analysis reveals that as design complexity increases, visualizing and manufacturing designs in VR improves additive manufacturability outcomes by reducing build time and support material usage compared to CAx, reducing manufacturing costs by up to 4.61 % ($32) per part. Using immersive VR also helps designers determine favorable build orientations faster with fewer attempts and without increasing the cognitive load experienced. These findings present important implications for the role of immersive experiences in preparing designers to quickly produce lower-cost and sustainable manufacturing solutions with AM.