A comparative study of the physical model and virtual model in industrial design

This paper describes a multi-sensory virtual reality application in industrial design. We demonstrate how model making aid students in solving an industrial design task, using the method of verbal protocol analysis. Survey research come from 12 students in arts, engineering and industrial design disciplines, we find that both physical and virtual model during an open-ended design task helped students generate and evaluate ideas, better visualize their ideas, and helped them discover differences between physical model and the virtual model which is used to guide design behavior. The result shows that virtual model making is more efficient than the physical model, and using virtual model system could enhance creative thinking and help students become more aware of their own design ideas. Experiment results demonstrate that the adopted method can increase students' effective haptics and can be widely used in computer-aided industrial design field.