Designing in the Invisible World: Virtual Reality and Industrial Design Education

This paper proposes an investigation onto the physiological and/or
cognitive effects that VR, as a technology-enabled learning platform, may
have on industrial design students when used as a medium for content
creation, with the goal of identifying optimal experience thresholds. This
will be accomplished through the adoption of a mixed methodology, with a
user-centered design (UCD) focus, designed to evaluate both the value of
the technology as a tool for abstract expression and, from task-based
exercises in virtual environments (VEs), identify optimal experience
thresholds through analysis of the physiological and/or cognitive load
variability among different user’s. Perception of value will be sought by
means of primary sourced qualitative data, while physiological and
cognitive quantitative data will derive from experiments. Once all data is
collected, both strands of information will be combined to design, prototype
and evaluate an optimal VR experience with the objective of assessing its
validity, and consequently establish a set of guidelines that may be used to
develop a future instructional framework.