V-Dream: Immersive Exploration of Generative Design Solution Space

TL;DR

V-Dream is an immersive virtual reality framework that enables designers to explore, analyze, and refine large generative design solution spaces interactively, improving decision-making in computational design workflows.

Contribution

It introduces a novel VR-based hybrid search and clustering approach for analyzing high-dimensional generative design solutions, enhancing user interaction and solution narrowing capabilities.

Findings

Successfully navigated over 16,000 design options in VR.

Enhanced iterative narrowing of solutions through clustering and recommender systems.

Improved understanding of solution performance metrics in immersive environments.

Abstract

Generative Design workflows have introduced alternative paradigms in the domain of computational design, allowing designers to generate large pools of valid solutions by defining a set of goals and constraints. However, analyzing and narrowing down the generated solution space, which usually consists of various high-dimensional properties, has been a major challenge in current generative workflows. By taking advantage of the interactive unbounded spatial exploration, and the visual immersion offered in virtual reality platforms, we propose V-Dream, a virtual reality generative analysis framework for exploring large-scale solution spaces. V-Dream proposes a hybrid search workflow in which a spatial stochastic search approach is combined with a recommender system allowing users to pick desired candidates and eliminate the undesired ones iteratively. In each cycle, V-Dream reorganizes the remaining options in clusters based on the defined features. Moreover, our framework allows users to inspect design solutions and evaluate their performance metrics in various hierarchical levels, assisting them in narrowing down the solution space through iterative cycles of search/select/re-clustering of the solutions in an immersive fashion. Finally, we present a prototype of our proposed framework, illustrating how users can navigate and narrow down desired solutions from a pool of over 16000 monitor stands generated by Autodesk's Dreamcatcher software.