DesignSpace: a manual interaction environment for computer aided design

pointing device shifted the paradigm and allowed visualization without explicit numerical references. DesignSpace is a computer-aided-design (CAD) system that facilitates dexterous manipulation of mechanical design representations. The system consists of an interactive simulation programmed with a seamless extended model of the designer's physical environment and driven with continuous instrumentation of the designer's physical actions. The simulation displays consistent visual and aural images of the virtual environment without occluding the designer's sensation of the physical surroundings. Developed at Stanford University's Center for Design Research (CDR), DesignSpace serves as an experimental testbed for design theory and methodology research. DesignSpace includes significant contributions from recent CDR development projects: TalkingGlove, CutPlane, VirtualHand, TeleSign, and VirtualGrasp. The current DesignSpace prototype provides modeling facility for only crude conceptual design and assembly, but can network multiple systems to share a common virtual space and arbitrate the collaborative interaction. The DesignSpace prototype employs three head-tracked rear projection images, head-coupled binaural audio, hand instrumentation, and electromagnetic position tracking. 3D CAD faces similar resistance today while workstation systems channel the design interaction through one and two dimensional interfaces. A design tool should maintain full dimensionality in the design process and not subject the design to unnecessary constraints in the communication between designers, the design media, and the final realized artifact. DesignSpace embraces this ideal by providing facilities for interactive simulation, dexterous manipulation, and remote collaboration. BACKGROUND CDR was founded in 1983 as an industry-academia collaborative and interdisciplinary R&D center to improve the engineering and product design processes. The Center accepts design problems from industry and government, and confronts them with creative design teams, for the purpose of design process observation and study, experimental design practice, and new design tool development. A long-term CDR goal is to aid the design process so that problem complexity does not impede creativity, design knowledge reuse, and human skill. CDR researchers and designers collaborate on projects to study the design process, to develop devices and interfaces to better map manual skills to data operations, to experiment with alternative means of design knowledge storage and retrieval, and to investigate design tool effectiveness. DesignSpace encapsulates technologies from several CDR projects within a conceptual design environment context to serve as a testbed for evaluating their effective application.