Affordable Interaction Systems for Design Review on a Virtual Room

In the design field, digital models are used for evaluation purposes during design reviews that take place into special rooms equipped with dedicated software and large display. The chief designer leads the review, interacting with his audience and staying near the screen. Therefore, the workstation used in the virtual room is, generally, very distant to the display, so that an additional operator is needed to manage the model. Moreover, the input system generally used is still based on “traditional” devices such as mouse and keyboard. Thus, the review process becomes slow and inefficient. This research aims to investigate different interaction techniques, based on existing devices and supported by position sensors, to make the design review more effective. The first case study is based on graphic interface that was implemented on a device with independent storage and processing resources (PDA). The second interaction methodology, in contrast, is built for maximising ease of use by reducing features and device complexity and it is based on a game console controller. Finally, the last case study applies direct human interaction and it is based on a glove-like device.