The ideating phase of product design is critical, as decisions made here influence the rest of the product’s lifecycle. Usually, early preliminary designs in engineering are created with pen and paper, which are incompatible with the subsequent digital design process. In an effort to find a modeling tool for early designs that provides the creative flexibility of freehand sketching but also the further processability of digital models, this research investigates natural modeling in virtual reality (VR). To do so, a VR modeling method allowing the intuitive creation of preliminary designs as simplified computer-aided design (CAD) models is presented. The main contribution is the evaluation of this natural VR modeling method against freehand sketching in an extensive user study.

Many immersive approaches for design activities show a great potential for their specific use cases, but still overall usage of extended reality technology in product developers day-to-day work is little. The user's workflow between classical desktop work environment and its immersive counterpart is interrupted by both a data gap and an interface gap. The three-dimensional product data usually needs preparation and the user has to physically change the interface in use. The hybrid augmented reality computer workstation aims to close these gaps. A hologram of the current model is visualized next to the screen in reach of the user for intuitive inspection and spatial interactions. In this paper we present use cases for this novel immersive workstation in the CAD workflow. An explorative user study of the typical product designer`s workflow reveals the most common activities. Guided by those, eight uses cases are formulated and classified into fundamental, drafting, and modelling CAD tasks. These cases include novel hybrid augmented reality interactions derived from literature, which are assessed with respect to their applicability.