Designing immersive experiences in virtual reality for design for additive manufacturing training

Adopting additive manufacturing (AM) in product design is limited by the shortage of skilled designers with design for AM (DfAM) expertise. This lack of AM talent is a major hurdle for organizations looking for innovative solutions to solve emerging engineering problems. Developing institutional talent in DfAM and AM process knowledge is of paramount importance to support organizations looking to leverage AM. Therefore, future designers need meaningful experiences to acquire DfAM intuition and AM process competency to enable informed artifact generation during the design process. This necessitates supplying active experiences that highlight the advantages and limitations of AM technologies and promote DfAM intuition. However, limited access to in-person experiences with physical AM systems inhibits designers from gaining such intuition. Digital modalities of AM education, such as computer-aided (CAx) and virtual reality (VR) tools, can alternatively provide access to experiential learning to cultivate this AM expertise. Where CAx experiences are typically associated with non-immersive modalities, VR experiences can offer enhanced immersion to replicate in-person experiences. There is a gap in the literature, however, that investigates immersive and non-immersive modalities on their effectiveness in training and artifact generation for AM. Additionally, there is a scarcity of information on design guides for creating immersive experiences that can support these research endeavors. It is essential to establish guidance on designing immersive experiences that offer meaningful and active engagement with AM technologies. Such guidance will support the development of experiences that cultivate DfAM intuition, AM process competency, and problem-solving skills. This research is thus motivated to explore the design of immersive VR experiences for problem-solving and artifact generation with AM. For this purpose, this work presents a generalized framework to inform the design of such experiences along with an example created using the proposed framework.