Design education has special requirements on using virtual studio setups. The Zoom fatigue during the world-wide COVID pandemic let our institution to test new tools which can help improve digital design education by supporting features like idea sharing, collaborative making, serendipitous discussion and group forming. For this purpose, we tested different tools during our Master program Innovation Design Engineering and collected student feedback. We found that immersion is a key factor impacting the effectiveness of group work in distance learning. This paper presents our applications and analysis of different platforms and contributes insights on how to build a virtual studio environment for an interdisciplinary master programme in design engineering. In this work, we will focus on our studies on Gather.town, Meta Horizon Workrooms and Spatial.
Zidong Lin, Shefali Bohra, Emre Kayganacia, Ayn Sayuti, Caroline Yan Zheng, Ashley Hall, Paul Anderson, Bjorn Sommer, "Towards an immersive virtual studio for design engineering" in Electronic Imaging, 2023, pp 226-1 - 226-7, https://doi.org/10.2352/EI.2023.35.2.SDA-226