Guiding Bachelor Students in VR Prototyping at TU Delft: From Brainwriting to Bodystorming [1]
Guiding students through the creative journey of VR prototyping, blending interaction design and storytelling to bring immersive experiences to life.
By Sueyoon Lee | OCT 3, 2024
From brainstorming and storyboarding to testing interactions in real-time, bachelor students at TU Delft explored the art of VR prototyping.
As part of the newly developed Prototyping for VR course (by Willemijn Elkhuizen, PhD) in the Industrial Design Engineering (IDE) department at TU Delft, I designed and led a two-session workshop for 39 bachelor students. The group included students from the IDE faculty as well as those from computer science and electrical engineering, many of whom had little to no prior experience with virtual reality (VR).
Given the limited 3.5-hour timeframe and the diverse levels of experience, I focused the workshop on two key components of VR design: interaction and narrative. While immersion and presence are important, these concepts can be challenging to fully grasp in such a short time. Instead, the workshop concentrated on building interaction-driven narratives around cultural heritage objects, providing students with a solid introduction to VR prototyping.
Workshop Structure: Tailored for Beginners in VR
While 3.5 hours is not enough time to fully explore the depth of brainstorming, I adapted the creative diamond model process—diverging, converging, and refining. My goal was to give students the chance to experience a variety of brainstorming techniques within a condensed timeframe, pushing them to move through an entire creative cycle while still gaining valuable insights.
The students had their cultural heritage object and developed an interaction vision statement in previous lectures. With VR prototyping starting the following week, my objective for this workshop was for them to leave with a clear, cohesive scenario they could immediately begin developing.
To achieve this, I structured the workshop into three phases:
Brainwriting (Diverging): Students were encouraged to generate a broad range of ideas without limitations, focusing on quantity over quality. This phase emphasized brainstorming numerous possibilities for interactions and narratives.
Storyboarding (Converging): From the ideas generated, students selected the interactions and narratives that aligned with their vision. They worked on crafting multiple storyboards, bringing their ideas to life and mapping out different potential scenarios.
Bodystorming (Refining): Students tested the interactions and scenes they had developed through storyboarding. This hands-on phase helped them refine their ideas by acting out interactions, ultimately solidifying the core plot and key interactions for their project.
By guiding them through these phases, the workshop provided students with a structured yet creative approach, ensuring they had a concrete, fluid scenario ready for VR prototyping.
Part 1: Brainstorming Interactions and Narratives
The brainstorming phase was designed to help students rapidly generate ideas, first focusing on interactions and then on narratives, all while working collaboratively in groups.
Interactions (3 minutes per category):
Students were asked to brainstorm interaction ideas in five different categories: tactile, visual, gestural, spatial, and sound. Each group had 3 minutes per category to generate as many ideas as possible, using sticky notes on large flip-over sheets. This rapid approach encouraged creative thinking without overanalyzing each concept.
Narratives (5 minutes per category):
The narrative brainstorming focused on two crucial storytelling components:
Main Player/Perspective: Who is the user or main player in the scenario?
Environment/Scale: What is the surrounding environment, and how does its scale affect the experience?
Groups had 5 minutes per narrative category to write down their ideas on sticky notes, adding them to their flip charts.
Once the brainstorming was complete, students used stickers to mark the most promising interaction and narrative ideas. This visual voting system helped them quickly identify the concepts that best aligned with their design vision.
Mix-Matching Interactions and Narratives
After selecting the best ideas from the brainstorming session, the students were given activity sheets. These sheets provided a structured template for mixing and matching the chosen interaction and narrative elements. By combining different ideas, students could create three cohesive storylines, ensuring that key elements—such as the main player, core interactions, and environmental factors—were all accounted for. This step provided clarity before transitioning to storyboarding, allowing students to organize their ideas into well-rounded narratives.
Part 2: Storyboarding the Interaction Scenario
Once the three best storylines were developed, the students moved on to storyboarding, where they turned these narratives into visual sequences using storyboarding templates. The templates helped them outline the flow of interactions, key moments, and transitions in their VR scenarios. This phase was essential for identifying gaps and solidifying how the user would engage with cultural heritage objects in a virtual environment.
The storyboards served as a visual guide for the next phase of the workshop, helping students structure their ideas and refine the user experience before testing the scenarios physically.
Part 3: Bodystorming the Material Experience
In the final activity, the students engaged in bodystorming, acting out their interaction scenarios to simulate how the user’s VR experience would unfold. Testing the scenarios in a physical space allowed students to see how transitions, interactions, and the overall atmosphere played out in real time.
Given the importance of testing in VR design, bodystorming helped students uncover flaws or gaps that might not have been apparent during brainstorming or storyboarding. Some students mentioned that during the bodystorming phase, they realized they were missing key interactions, which allowed them to adjust their scenarios before moving on to building the experience in VR. This iterative approach prevented issues from emerging at a later stage of development, where changes would be more difficult and time-consuming.
To support the process, I provided tripods for recording their sessions, and students used available materials—such as leftover cardboard—to simulate the VR environment. The ability to reflect on recorded sessions provided further insights into how they could enhance their designs.
Reflection: Key Takeaways from the Workshop
Feedback from students indicated that the workshop was "very fun and effective", even from some who were skeptical in the first place. They found that the structured flow—from brainstorming to storyboarding and finally to bodystorming—helped them continuously build on and refine their ideas. Many appreciated that bodystorming allowed them to identify and fix issues with their interactions early in the process, preventing them from facing challenges later when developing the actual VR experience.
For me, this workshop was particularly meaningful. As a former graduate of TU Delft, returning to the same department and sharing the knowledge and experience I’ve gained over the years—both in VR and workshop facilitation—was a rewarding experience. When I was a student at TU Delft, there were no dedicated VR courses, so I had to learn VR on my own and initiate my own projects. Being able to return to campus and help shape the future of VR education for these students was a full-circle moment.
Looking Ahead: Prototyping with ShapesXR
With this foundation in place, the second session will allow students to use ShapesXR, a VR tool designed for rapid prototyping, to bring their interaction scenarios to life. This will provide them with the opportunity to fully realize their ideas in a virtual environment and transition from concept to immersive prototype.