Immersive Technologies to Accelerate Innovation

7Immersive Tools for Every Innovative Situation

People don’t always remember what you say, or even what you do, but they always remember how you made them feel.

MAYA ANGELOU

7.1. Design in virtual reality

To enable non-designers to get involved in design projects, new methods are needed. Co-design, when carried out with the right methods and tools, provides equal opportunities for all participants with diverse skills to co-create ideas simultaneously. However, current co-design processes involving these users tend to limit their contributions to the proposal of basic ideas, only through brainstorming. The co-design approach needs to be enhanced by a suitable representation ecosystem that promotes active participation (Dorta et al. 2019).

7.1.1. The natural gesture

Some areas of design do not lend themselves well to pencil sketching. This is the case, for example, for the design of car lights, which is not limited to the shape of the headlight, but requires visualizing how the light will look when it is on, on the vehicle and with a realistic lighting context. Thus, the only real alternative to real testing is three-dimensional (3D) simulation. For this specific domain, modeling with a game creation engine allows for rapid prototyping of ideas, and virtual reality allows for visualization of these prototypes to test their impact (Ekströmer et al. 2019).

Emerging technologies (virtual and augmented reality, artificial intelligence, connected objects, etc.) can provide tools ...