Evaluation of virtual reality interface for product shape designs

It is generally acknowledged that existing computer-aided design systems have inefficient user interfaces. Especially during the concept shape design stage, these systems prove to be cumbersome because of two reasons: (i) they require the usage of two-dimensional (2D) input devices, while the designs are typically three-dimensional (3D); and, (ii) CAD systems require the specification of dimensions, which may not be precisely known at the concept stage. To overcome these limitations, this research proposes the use of virtual reality (VR) devices to provide a physically intuitive interface for concept shape creation. The intuitiveness of the interface arises from the use of natural hand gestures and voice commands that emulate the way in which designers discuss concept shapes. In this scenario, the interface between the human and computer plays a central role with respect to usability, usefulness and accuracy. The focus of this research is on using two modalities: (i) hand input; and, (ii) voice driven commands, or a combination of these modalities to accomplish typical CAD tasks. Based on experience with a conventional CAD system, a set of typical CAD tasks are identified. A series of tests are then performed to determine the relative efficiency of the different modality combinations to achieve each task. The interface test results indicate that while voice commands are intuitive in initiating operations such as viewpoint zooming in/out and object creation/deletion, hand inputs are effective in performing spatial tasks such as interactive dimensioning and re-location of shapes. It was also found that a combination of voice and hand input can be used for accomplishing certain tasks more effectively such as, zooming in/out a particular direction (hand orientation indicates direction and voice is used for indicating zoom in/out operation). Based on the experience with the prototypical system developed it is concluded that voice and hand input are effective ways of building three-dimensional shapes in a virtual reality environment. To verify the efficiency of the VR-CAD interface, sample injection molded parts are built on the current VR-based CAD system and a traditional CAD system, and the times taken to build these parts are compared. The test results indicate that building geometry shapes containing canonical forms, such as block, cylinder, sphere, ... etc, using a VR interface results in a speedup of five to ten times over traditional CAD systems.