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Alex081056 only in that environment, so building furniture in VR without
risk of injury is of limited practical value if the result cannot
be brought into the physical world.
Some systems let a user export a VR-created object to
a 3D modelling tool such as Blender and fabricate it with a
3D printer, but 3D printing is a poor match for furniture-scale

DIY because of build-volume limits and the restriction to a
fixed, typically plastic, material.
Moreover, the woodworking games mentioned above are
experience of physical DIY while eliminating its associated risks. not designed as DIY aids: their objects can only be shared or
Users can experiment with different designs, test assembly saved as OBJ files, with no function to export the complete
sequences, and make mistakes without any real-world part dimensions needed to reproduce an assembly in reality.
consequences, which is particularly valuable for novice makers This gap, between VR systems that support the DIY
who lack confidence in their skills. process and the near-total absence of support for physically
Free-form modelling tools such as VRSketchIn, which realising the resulting design, motivates the present work. The

examined pen-and-tablet 3D sketching in VR, and VR-Doh, purpose of this study is to propose support functions that
which enabled hands-on, clay-like sculpting through hand enable users to physically fabricate objects designed in VR.
gestures, let users create complex geometries intuitively. To this end, we propose a VR-DIY system that allows a
Vlah et al. similarly found that VR modeling supports the user to temporarily disassemble a VR-created object into its
rapid creation of freeform geometry during the embodiment constituent parts, arrange the parts at even intervals with their
design phase, albeit with less precision than conventional CAD. dimensions labelled, and automatically compile photographs
Other systems bring the physical world into the loop, as in of each part captured from six directions together with its

MixFab, a gesture-based mixed-reality environment in which dimensions and estimated material cost into a PDF blueprint.
non-experts design objects and scan real items into their By combining this blueprint with a wood custom-cut
designs, and RoMA, which couples AR design with a robotic ordering service, the parts designed in VR can be physically
3D printer so that geometry sketched in AR is fabricated in situ. fabricated.
These works show that VR and related immersive media The main contributions of this paper are twofold. First, we
can support intuitive, life-size design and even fabrication, implement a VR-based furniture-DIY environment comprising
making them a promising basis for DIY. object generation, cutting, joining, and save/load functions,
Focusing on woodworking, prior work includes hand-tool- together with three novel functions that, to our knowledge,
shaped VR input devices for intuitive virtual hand-crafting and existing VR-DIY systems do not provide: automatic part

VR-based vocational training in furniture making that reduced alignment with dimension labelling, six-view PDF blueprint
cost, space, and risk. export, and per-part material cost estimation.
Commercially, VRKShop, a VR game on the Steam platform, Second, we present a workflow that enables virtual furniture
lets users saw, hammer, mark, and paint wood in a virtual designs to be translated into physical fabrication by combining
workshop and export objects as OBJ files. the generated PDF blueprint with a wood custom-cut ordering
VR-based fabrication nevertheless has a fundamental service, thereby demonstrating a complete pipeline from virtual
limitation: an object created in a virtual environment exists design to real-world object.