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40 DESIGN SEP/OCT 2026 FDM ASIA | www.fdmasia.com

pxhere.com in VR and reproduce the result with ordinary tools, exporting
Our system bridges this gap by letting users design freely

the complete set of part dimensions as a single document
so that the object can be built in the real world.

System Design & Development

The proposed system was developed in Unity (version
2022.3.52f1) for the commercially available, unmodified Meta
Quest 3 head-mounted display. Development was carried
out on a PC with an Intel Core i7-14700KF CPU, an NVIDIA
GeForce RTX 4070 GPU, and 32 GB of RAM.
and the commercial VR game VRKShop lets users saw and The system is organised into two functional layers on top
hammer virtual wood and export finished objects as OBJ files. of a common object-management foundation. Users interact
However, these were designed as VR woodworking games with the virtual workspace through the VR headset and
rather than aids for physical DIY: VRKShop can export OBJ hand controllers, which provide the input for generating and

geometry but provides no function to export the complete set manipulating objects in three-dimensional space.
of part dimensions as a single document, which would be The first layer comprises DIY functions that let the user
required to reproduce the assembled object in the real world. model furniture entirely within VR. The second layer comprises
Finally, recent work examines how far mixed reality can fabrication-support functions that convert a completed virtual
stand in for physical prototypes when evaluating a design. object into the information needed to build it physically,
Wang et al. built mixed prototypes combining 3D printing, ultimately producing a PDF blueprint that can be handed to
interactive simulation, and a head-mounted display for the an external wood custom-cut service.

usability evaluation of a handheld printer and found them well Four functions were implemented on the Unity VR core
suited to comparing design alternatives, even though their to support the DIY process itself. The object generation
absolute values may deviate from the final product. function lets a user spawn objects of various sizes, shapes,
Dybvik et al. further showed, using fNIRS, that physical, and colours inside VR.
virtual, and mixed-reality prototypes elicit significantly different Sliders and toggles on a panel set the desired size and
prefrontal brain activity during evaluation and design modification. colour; pressing the Spawn button then instantiates an object
This motivates providing users with accurate, exportable to the right of the panel. Three primitive shapes are available:
dimensional information so that a design conceived in VR box, sphere, and cylinder, using Unity's built-in primitives.
can be faithfully reproduced and verified in the real world. Every spawned object carries collision-detection components,

Prior VR design and CAD tools create digital geometry physics-simulation components, controller-interaction enabling
but stop at the edge of the virtual environment; AR tools for components, and material data defining its colour and
physical DIY guide the hands but assume a predetermined appearance.
artifact; XR in-situ systems couple design and making but rely The object cutting function lets a user cut an object inside
on specialised hardware or a specific material; and existing VR. It is built on EzySlice, a pure mesh-cutting library that does
virtual fabrication systems are games that do not export the not itself support cutting inside VR; we therefore used a VR
data needed to rebuild the artifact physically. cutting extension as a base and modified it in three key ways.