Let's do Design Thinking Virtually: Design and Evaluation of a Virtual Reality Application for Collaborative Prototyping

Design Thinking (DT) is a widely used approach to develop human-centric solutions in organizational settings. One of the main activities within DT is prototyping, which allows for visualizing design ideas. However, the geographical distribution of teams and the lack of suitable working environments challenge these practices. This paper presents a design science research project that resolves these issues through virtual reality. Drawing on findings for creativity support, we derive meta-requirements and design principles and develop the DTinVR application that allows teams to visualize their ideas based on gestural interaction. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to enable collaborative prototyping using hand tracking. We confirm the effectiveness and positive usability of DTinVR by means of three evaluations and discuss how our design principles can help to develop immersive solutions. The findings of this study contribute to the design knowledge on immersive applications in the information systems discipline.

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