Driven by the need to develop highly complex products in short development cycles, many companies are aiming at fully digitized design workflows and continuous data and information flow. XR-interfaces can extend current CAD-functionality to allow the usage of CAD-data in more stages of the product design process. In this paper, a platform linking a game-engine and CAD-software to efficiently explore XR-CAD Interfaces is presented. An architecture meeting the requirements of research environments is designed and implemented using the unreal engine and Siemens NX. The proposed system allows to efficiently explore interfaces for design sketch creation using different hardware setups.

The increased availability of affordable virtual reality hardware in the last years boosted research and development of such systems for many fields of application. While extended reality systems are well established for visualization of product data, immersive authoring tools that can create and modify that data are yet to see widespread productive use. Making use of building blocks, we see the possibility that such tools allow quick expression of spatial concepts, even for non-expert users. Optical hand-tracking technology allows the implementation of this immersive modeling using natural user interfaces. Here the users manipulated the virtual objects with their bare hands. In this work, we present a systematic collection of natural interactions suited for immersive building-block-based modeling systems. The interactions are conceptually described and categorized by the task they fulfil.

Extended reality user interfaces for engineering design often suffer from gaps in the user's workflow. Usually, the user must at least put on hardware, but often also data preparation is needed. This research aims to close these gaps by proposing a setup fusing desktop and immersive user experience into a hybrid augmented reality computer workstation. Here the user can decide for each operation what modality is best suited, using the strengths of both interfaces while avoiding their drawbacks. In this paper, a concept for such a hybrid computer workstation is developed using the morphological matrix method. Different solutions for the main features, holographic stereo display, spatial interaction, and the software architecture, are discussed and a reasoned combination is proposed as a feasible concept.

Many immersive approaches for design activities show a great potential for their specific use cases, but still overall usage of extended reality technology in product developers day-to-day work is little. The user's workflow between classical desktop work environment and its immersive counterpart is interrupted by both a data gap and an interface gap. The three-dimensional product data usually needs preparation and the user has to physically change the interface in use. The hybrid augmented reality computer workstation aims to close these gaps. A hologram of the current model is visualized next to the screen in reach of the user for intuitive inspection and spatial interactions. In this paper we present use cases for this novel immersive workstation in the CAD workflow. An explorative user study of the typical product designer`s workflow reveals the most common activities. Guided by those, eight uses cases are formulated and classified into fundamental, drafting, and modelling CAD tasks. These cases include novel hybrid augmented reality interactions derived from literature, which are assessed with respect to their applicability.

Technologien der erweiterten Realität (extended reality, XR) finden im gesamten Produktentwicklungsprozess Anwendung. Insbesondere Systeme zur aktiven Erzeugung und Veränderung digitaler Produktdaten bieten noch viel Potential. Die Erforschung und Entwicklung dieser immersiven Interfaces beruht maßgeblich auf der Evaluation durch Nutzerstudien, denn nur so kann die Einsatztauglichkeit der Mensch-Maschine-Schnittstellen seriös beurteilt und verglichen werden. Bei der Konzeptionierung und Durchführung dieser Nutzerstudien gibt es viel zu beachten. In dieser Arbeit wird ein Leitfaden für das Design von Evaluationen von XR Interfaces für die Produktentwicklung präsentiert. Zu Beginn müssen die Fragestellungen festgelegt werden, welche die Studie beantworten soll. Ausgehend von diesen müssen die zu testenden Versuchsbedingungen, die gestellten Aufgaben, die aufgenommen Metriken, die gewählten Probanden und der geplante Ablauf festgelegt werden. Zusätzlich zu der allgemeinen Darlegung wird das Vorgehen anhand eines Fallbeispiels angewandt. Die Gestaltung einer Nutzerstudie zur Evaluation der Usability und Eignung eines neuartigen Virtual Reality Interfaces zur natürlichen Gestaltung von Vorentwürfen wird vorgestellt.