From Brick to Click: Comparing LEGO Building in Virtual Reality and the Physical World

TL;DR

This study compares LEGO building in physical, VR, and enhanced VR environments, revealing VR's potential to boost creativity and engagement, especially with added 'superpowers', and offers design recommendations for VR experiences.

Contribution

It provides a comparative analysis of physical and virtual LEGO building, highlighting how VR enhancements influence user performance and creativity, and suggests design principles for VR environments.

Findings

VR with superpowers increased creative free-building engagement.

Physical LEGO offers tactile familiarity but VR enhances creative freedom.

Design recommendations include balancing automation and user control.

Abstract

We present a comparative study of building with LEGO in three environments: the physical world, a Virtual Reality (VR) counterpart, and a VR setting enhanced with "superpowers". The study aims to understand how traditional creative hands-on activities translate to virtual environments, with potential benefits for educational, training, entertainment, and therapeutic uses. 22 participants engaged in both structured assembly and creative free-building tasks across these environments. We investigated differences in user performance, engagement, and creativity, with a focus on how the additional VR functionalities influenced the building experience. The findings reveal that while the physical environment offers a familiar tactile experience, VR, particularly with added superpowers, was clearly favoured by participants in the creative free-building scenario. Our recommendations for VR design include balancing automation with user control to enhance task efficiency while maintaining engagement, and implementing intuitive systems that manage complexity to prevent user overwhelm and support creative freedom.