Design, communication & collaboration in immersive virtual environments

Abstract

Virtual Environments (VE) are increasingly offered as environments for design. Using VE to visualize ideas from the initial steps of design, the architect is challenged to deal with perception of space, solid and void, without translations to and from a two dimensional media. From this new ability, we might expect new forms of design expression. The goal of our study was to identify how designers use and communicate early design ideas by using immersive three-dimensional VEs. We set-up a series of experiments including navigation- and perception-tasks, designing in immersive VE, transcription of design, remote communication between design partners and controlled observations. We explored ini..