Enhancing Product Ideation Workflows Through Immersive Interaction: A Task‐Centered Study in Virtual Reality

ABSTRACT

Virtual Reality (VR) has gained significant momentum in creative endeavors due to its unique characteristics of immersion, interaction, and imagination. However, effectively harnessing its “imagination” potential—specifically how VR content influences creative ability and empowers humans in goal‐oriented tasks like product design—remains a challenge. This paper presents a tailored Immersive Ideation System (IIS) for product appearance design. The system enables designers to perform sketching, modeling, and conceptual review within integrated VR scenes, fostering a fluid and seamless ideation workflow. To evaluate the efficacy of the IIS, we conducted a comprehensive task‐centered user study involving 24 industrial design students and 6 professional designers. Our analysis focuses on the influence of VR environments on creative behaviors and design outputs. The results suggest that while specific VR conditions relate to differences in design flexibility and originality, they also introduce potential trade‐offs with design fixation, offering tentative insights for the configuration of future immersive design workspaces.