Integrating Physical, Digital, and Virtual Modeling Environments in a Collaborative Design Thinking Tool

Design thinking is a creative process that requires brainstorming techniques that take place in a physical environment. However, such physical interactions are not possible in remote environments. In this paper, we propose a software tool for design thinking that bridges the gap between physical, digital, and virtual modeling environments. We describe and evaluate a virtual storyboarding application that enables remote collaborative design thinking in 3D and the conversion of these 3D models into 2D digital models. To evaluate the approach, we conducted an experiment with students and were able to derive directions for further research in this area.