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I design mechanical stuff for a living and I can't imagine that designing cars in VR is more efficient than CAD. There isn't any barrier right now from idea to CAD. If an engineer (or a scientist) can imagine it, an engineer will be able to design and create it digitally with current technology. I would say the current limitation is the manufacturing tools rather than the designing tools.

Side note, I think the work process for designing the exterior of cars is to create a sculptures with clay, transfer to clay to CAD, and rinse and repeat. I wonder if VR will ever beat manual sculpting.

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Also design mechanical stuff for a living. I’ve spent multiple days over the course of the past six months creating drawings to demonstrate how a design will ‘feel’ once made. A 1:1 3d model that other stakeholders could walk into would be so much more effective.

As a hobbyist - the CAD tools I've used (Fusion360 and Inventor) - are clunky with arbitrary 3D shapes (e.g. a Porsche door panel). How do people in the "real world" do it? Iterate in Maya / similar and then export? Think in parametric curves? Something else entirely?

An industrial designer would sketch the outline then the images would be brought into parametric CAD software as references. The 2D image can be built into 2D/3D lines, then these curves are used to create surfaces which finally are stitched together. The nature of complex surfaces interacting and joining seamlessly is where the difficulty lies. "A class" surfacing is an entire speciality and can take a career to master. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Class_A_surface

Yeah but presentation is pretty different from designing. I know where you are coming from, I always tell people pretty pictures comes before practicality when it comes to meeting with management.

Why do you assume CAD and VR are mutually exclusive? Interfaces of the future haven't been designed yet - but it's not hard to naively imagine taking any CAD program and turning the viewport into a 3D window. Something that allows you to use your head to look around it, use your fingers to spin the object around, pinch to zoom or other gestures. The rest of the interface could stay the same as it is now and interacted with via a mouse and keyboard, and it would be much better than the current CAD (if there was a VR HMD that has a very high resolution and allows some level of mixed reality for interaction with with desk objects as well as your colleagues)

I think 3D mouse does pretty much what you ask for though[1]. I'm sure the possibilities are beyond my imagination with VR but I personally just can't see the benefits. Most engineers are pretty good with their abstract of space so I can't imagine VR being a necessity for design.

[1] https://www.3dconnexion.com/

I've briefly used one of those. It's a cool little device once you get used to it, but there's definitely a learning curve. By comparison, it's hard to understate how intuitive VR headsets are for controlling your camera. That might not matter for professional drafters, but it would certainly make 3D modelling more accessible to the public in general. I can imagine a future in which 3D models are created and used much like images are used today.

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