A Virtual Reality Application for 3D Sketching in Conceptual Design

The development of Virtual Reality in a wide range of field, including engineering related applications, has pushed towards the investigation of novel solutions that are able to take advantage of such new possibilities, while possibly trying to seamlessly integrate them within currently established workflows. Regarding conceptual sketching, which commonly represents one of the first activities taking place across Product Design development work-flows, there are examples of applications that allow to shift from the 2D layout of traditional drawing to a fully immersive 3D environment where the user is able to produce strokes in space by means of a set of natural gestures. Despite sounding extremely intuitive, this kind of approach also comes with potential issues: the lack of a supportive surface onto which the user can rely on to produce strokes with a high degree of precision while not feeling tired after prolonged sessions can be problematic. Based on these premises, a new hybrid approach is proposed: the user is still immersed in the Virtual Environment, but is able to make use of a traditional tablet device which lays on a physical desk in order to produce visible strokes in Virtual Reality, while having the possibility to simultaneously manipulate the position and the orientation of the scene thanks to a hand tracking device to break into the third dimen-sion. As designed, the application supports the generation of simple line strokes and few basic commands, but a thorough testing session is still needed to validate the solution and investigate on the necessary improvements.