A study on the differences among M3D, S3D and HMD for students with different degrees of spatial ability in design education

Abstract

In the curriculum of product design education, some teaching materials for demonstrating and discussing case studies are always presented in images with monocular depth cues. However, using this approach to train students with different spatial abilities is a great challenge. It was reported that stereoscopic 3D (S3D) displays were helpful for the performance of depth-related tasks. Some research groups had tried to use stereoscopic visualization for teaching Descriptive Geometry, and some research reported that the effect of stereoscopic displays on science learning was related to the spatial ability of the viewer. In product design education, identifying proportion and manipulating proportional relationships were important practices of form-giving training. Whether the correctness of proportion judgement would be influenced by different displays remained an open question. Therefore, this study aimed to explore the performances of students with different background across three display modes, i.e. M3D, S3D, and head-mounted display (HMD). In the experiments, physical chairs and the corresponding digital models with different proportions were used as the stimuli. The participants were asked to identify the correct digital models of chairs. The results indicated that HMD approach could facilitate the reflection and adaptation of dimensions and proportions, compensating the differences of spatial abilities, and therefore enhancing the learning effects significantly.