4 Benefits of Using VR in Product Design

Virtual reality has had a massive impact on countless industries–including the field of product design. Traditionally, product design has relied on creating prototypes out of simple materials like paper and cardboard. While that can give designers a sense of what finished products would look like, it’s not ideal for testing product usability.

In contrast, using VR in the product design process allows for highly-interactive product testing. Of course, the benefits of adding this technology to your workflow don’t stop there. Read on for four of the biggest perks that come with using VR in product design.

1. Enables Collaboration

While remote work offers great advantages–more productive employees, better work/life balances, and better retention–there are some drawbacks. Video calls and emails, for example, can’t fully recapture the experience of talking to someone face-to-face, which can be a real issue in highly collaborative fields like product design.

On the other hand, VR-powered online meetings can feel almost as natural as face-to-face meetings while preserving the convenience of working remotely. Plus, you can easily share interactive 3D models of your latest prototypes with other team members–no matter where they are.

2. Products at Full Scale

Before they’re ready to create real-world prototypes, product design teams need to have a plan in place. Creating sketches (and, in recent decades, CAD models) is a simple way for these groups to get started on product concepts. But while seeing an illustration can give you an idea of what the final product might look like, it’s still hard to understand its scale and how it will fit into its surroundings.

When you add VR to your product design process, you won’t have to rely on your imagination to get a sense of what your end product will look like. Instead, you’ll be able to intuitively understand how it would look and function in the real world. 

3. Saves on Cost

A major benefit associated with virtual prototyping is that they don’t physically exist. Meaning you won’t need to spend money on materials for prototyping. You also won’t need to make multiple prototypes as making changes to VR prototypes is as simple as editing a model.

Prototypes can cost anywhere from $100 to $30,000 or more, even partially switching to a VR-based pipeline can result in significant savings. That’s especially true for industrial businesses, where prototypes are more likely to be large and complicated.

4. Streamlined Workflow

Since it’s so easy to make changes to VR prototypes, you’ll be able to tweak them on the fly. That’s a sharp contrast from older prototyping methods, in which you’d have to alter a physical object (or build an entirely different prototype) to reflect this feedback.

With that said, you don’t need to adopt a completely VR-based approach to product design to enjoy these benefits. This technology perfectly aligns with other modern-day product design techniques, mainly 3D printing. For example, your company could iterate on early virtual prototypes in a VR environment before 3D printing a refined prototype to better understand how it feels to use.

How to Leverage the Benefits of VR

To truly benefit from VR for product design, it’s crucial to utilize high-quality virtual reality technology. That means partnering with reliable VR/AR experts. 

MACE Virtual Labs is the top supplier of turnkey VR solutions for enterprise use. They manage your VR equipment from end-to-end helping you choose the best option for your needs to implementing it into your organization to managing your fleet. 

MACE Virtual Labs ensures that you’re fully set up to leverage all the benefits VR has to offer.