Studying Changes to the Additive Manufacturability of Design Solutions When Prepared and Simulated in Immersive Virtual Reality

Abstract Solving problems with additive manufacturing (AM) often means fabricating geometrically complex designs, layer-by-layer, along one or multiple directions. Designers navigate this 3D spatial complexity to determine the best design and manufacturing solutions to produce functional parts, manufacturable by AM. However, to assess the manufacturability of their solutions, designers need modalities that naturally visualize AM processes and the designs enabled by them. Creating physical parts offers such visualization but becomes expensive and time-consuming over multiple design iterations. While non-immersive simulations can alleviate this cost of physical visualization, adding digital immersion further improves outcomes from the visualization experience. This research, therefore, studies how differences in immersion between computer-aided (CAx) and virtual reality (VR) environments affect: 1. determining the best solution for additively manufacturing a design and 2. the cognitive load experienced from completing the DfAM problem-solving experience. For the study, designers created a 3D manifold model and simulated manufacturing it in either CAx or VR. Analysis of the filtered data from the study shows that slicing and printing their designs in VR yields a significant change in the manufacturability outcomes of their design compared to CAx. No observable differences were found in the cognitive load experienced between the two modalities. This means that the experiences in VR may influence improvements to manufacturability outcomes without changes to the mental exertion experienced by the designers. This presents key implications for how designers are equipped to solve design problems with AM.