Prototyping techniques you can use as a novice designer in Health VR

Source: microsoft maquette, 2018

Imagine an endless number of ideas that remain trapped in your head every day as a designer. On top of that, you find it hard to download your thoughts in 3D. Well, I was experiencing the same dilemma while working on my project wherein I wanted to conduct CBT based activities in a therapy Island in VR. Thus I collected all these prototyping tools that can be used in Virtual Reality, especially for prototyping initial designs for the Oculus Quest Platform and making ideation more enjoyable and easy!

ShapesXR

This tool was the easiest to pick up as it came with step-by-step instructions and sample scenarios to play around with. It aims to democratize 3D content creation by manipulating simple shapes at scale, changing materials, research user flows, and pitch scenes in motion with an easy-to-use staging system. This helps on focusing on the ideation part rather than the technicalities.

Source: Made in ShapesXR by Sampada

GravitySketch

The main focus here is on your gestures in the VR space. Whether you’re sketching a car, giving feedback, or just walking around, the goal is to remove any barriers between the thought, the action, and the result. This made it very intriguing for me to pick upon this tool for my therapy island testing.

Source: work of design speculation done in GravitySketch and Figma

Unity Editor

I had learnt this a year back in my Introduction to Virtual Reality class and since then, I had been fascinated by VR. It has a range of freely available assets on their Unity store and you can make anything from a simple room to a whole museum experience, just using a single platform. This is useful in both mid-fi and hi-fi prototyping.

Source: Made in Unity using the free assets available

Collection of all other tools I came across during low-fi, hi-fi and mid-fi prototyping research

Source: List of tools

References

1. Müller, M., Günther, T., Kammer, D., Wojdziak, J., Lorenz, S., & Groh, R. (2016b). Smart Prototyping — Improving the Evaluation of Design Concepts Using Virtual Reality. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 47–58. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-39907-2_5
2. Gravity Sketch. (2022, December 22). Gravity Sketch | 3D design and modelling software. https://www.gravitysketch.com/
3. Aromaa, S., Leino, S. P., & Viitaniemi, J. (2014). Virtual prototyping in human-machine interaction design. VTT technology, 185.
4. ShapesXR — VR Creation and Collaboration Platform for Remote Teams. (n.d.). https://www.shapesxr.com/
5. Ottosson, S. (2002). Virtual reality in the product development process. Journal of Engineering Design, 13(2), 159–172. https://doi.org/10.1080/09544820210129823
6. Technologies, U. (n.d.). Unity Platform. Unity. https://unity.com/products/unity-platform
7. https://uxdesign.cc/rapid-vr-prototyping-without-coding-in-2019-94d9ca2b544a