Collaborative reviews in design education using NX Virtual Reality

Design education is vastly based on project-based courses where students learn while working on real-world problems. To ensure that students gather knowledge and develop correct problem solving routines, educators provide personalized feedback through reviews of students' work. During these reviews, educators discuss the work with students and think aloud to help students understand critical points of their design. Traditionally, these reviews are conducted by visualizing students' work using a desktop computer or paper-based visualization. However, educators can have issues with understanding size perceptions and delivering the issue to students, while students can have problems understanding the points raised by educators. It is thus necessary to support these reviews with technologies that facilitate discussion and support shared understanding. The CAD course at the University of Zagreb implemented Siemens NX Virtual Reality to test its potential for design reviews. In this course, 14 engineers from several companies reviewed seven designs created by three-member student teams. In a collaborative design review session, four members (two engineers and two students) were simultaneously in virtual reality at the one-hour long meeting. Both students and reviewers reported a positive experience. More specifically, as the main advantages of Siemens NX Virtual Reality, both students and engineers reported improved size perception and easier discussion of problems and solutions since they could always see where the others were looking and pointing at while talking. In addition, shared views and manipulations of objects were also quite useful as they encourage collaborative work. Employing Siemens NX Virtual Reality is also robust to sudden lockdowns, enables employee experts from different physical locations around the world and thus enables a smoother work of virtual teams. Finally, this type of review is robust to the lockdowns such as the one caused by the pandemic.