From Virtual Design to Physical Fabrication: A VR-Based DIY Furniture-Making System with Blueprint Export
DIY (do-it-yourself) furniture making performed in the physical world is inevitably accompanied by trial-and-error failures, material waste, and injury risk, all of which discourage people from attempting it. Virtual reality (VR) can remove these costs, but existing VR-based DIY systems only let users create virtual objects; none of them provide a way to turn the resulting design into a physical object. This study proposes a VR-DIY system that supports both virtual furniture making and the subsequent physical fabrication of the created object, and evaluates its usability and effectiveness. In the proposed system, users generate cuboid, spherical, and cylindrical objects of arbitrary size and color in VR, and cut and join them to build furniture. The system can also temporarily disassemble a finished object into its constituent parts, arrange the parts by size with dimensions labeled, and export a PDF blueprint reporting the six-view photographs, dimensions, and material cost of each part. As a preliminary trial, we constructed an actual chair by procuring wood based on a design generated by the proposed system. The results provide preliminary evidence that the proposed system has the potential to support both virtual DIY and the transition from virtual furniture design to physical fabrication. These findings also suggest potential applications in areas such as design education, industrial prototyping, and collaborative design environments.