A Review of the Capabilities of Current Low-Cost Virtual Reality Technology and Its Potential to Enhance the Design Process

Abstract

In the past few years, there have been some significant advances in consumer virtual reality (VR) devices. Devices such as the Oculus Rift, HTC Vive, Leap Motion™ Controller, and Microsoft Kinect® are bringing immersive VR experiences into the homes of consumers with much lower cost and space requirements than previous generations of VR hardware. These new devices are also lowering the barrier to entry for VR engineering applications. Past research has suggested that there are significant opportunities for using VR during design tasks to improve results and reduce development time. This work reviews the latest generation of VR hardware and reviews research studying VR in the design process. Additionally, this work extracts the major themes from the reviews and discusses how the latest technology and research may affect the engineering design process. We conclude that these new devices have the potential to significantly improve portions of the design process.

Virtual Reality and Its Applications in Education: Survey

“…Currently, tools providing high-end VR experiences, such as Oculus Rift or HTC Vive cost approximately $400-600, respectively; they should be supported by computationally powerful PC, which is still a relatively expensive alternative to conventional methods of teaching. However, using HMDs bright immersive VR experiences into the homes and classes with much lower cost and space requirements than previous generations of VR hardware [139]. VR technology is under constant development, seeking low-cost, wearable solutions for the mass market.…”

Cheap and Immersive Virtual Reality: Application in Cartography

“…The entire Google Cardboard platform consists of cardboard packaging, a pair of optical lenses, rubber bands, Velcro fasteners, and a small magnet that uses a built-in smartphone magnetometer as a primitive button. After the initial success of Google Cardboard, a number of other companies began to develop and produce cheap headsets for mobile devices (Coburn, et al, 2017;Ripton, 2014). For example, the company Samsung launched its own platform under the name of Samsung Gear VR in 2015 (Faulkner, 2018).…”

“…We focused on low-cost devices for creating and mediating VR, especially on headsets, which should provide an immersive virtual reality experience and which are, at the same time, relatively cheap and affordable. These headsets, and VR in general, are currently used for many different purposes and in various applications, including archaeology (Chmelík and Jurda, 2017;Liarokapis et al, 2017), architecture (Portman et al, 2015), medicine (Li et al, 2017), engineering and design (Coburn et al, 2017), education (Kovalčík et al, 2012;Juřík et al, 2016;Moskal and Choate, 2017), the game industry (Shepherd and Bleasdale-Shepherd, 2009;Chądzyńska and Gotlib, 2015), etc. The use of VR has also increased in geosciences, for example in spatial and urban planning (Herbert and Chen, 2015;Portman et al, 2015), crisis management (Kubíček et al, 2011;Bandrova et al, 2012;Herman et al, 2017), noise mapping (Herman and Řezník, 2015), teaching geography (Stojšić et al, 2016;Carbonell and Saorín, 2017), cartography (Juřík et al, 2017;Kubíček et al, 2017) and geoinformatics (Řezník, 2013;Li et al, 2015).…”

Effectiveness of an Immersive Virtual Environment for Collaboration With Gesture Support Using Low-Cost Hardware

“…However, these early systems utilized technology, which is expensive and incurs high overhead costs to run making it prohibitively expensive for companies to provide their design teams with general access [5]. Recently, new consumer grade VR hardware has been produced with much lower costs and fewer barriers to entry [6]. This new hardware could pave the way for more general access to VR technology and hence VR tools for design teams.…”