Faculty and students in the field of interior design have collaborated on a digital program that promises to help designers think “outside the box,” as the saying goes – even as they remake it from within.

With the Virtual Sketch Project, developed at the Advanced Computing Center for the Arts and Design, participants create interior spaces by immersing themselves in a virtual environment that can be manipulated with the wave of a hand. This represents a leap forward in interior design technology, which previously consisted of blueprints and models in the planning stage.

“We design three-dimensional spaces, but we’ve always used two-dimensional (tools) to describe those spaces,” said Jeff Haase, an assistant professor of interior design who directed the project. “We’re always outside of the idea. We wanted to know if there was anything we could do to change that.”

While interior design software had previously been available, Haase realized that marrying it with virtual reality technology would engulf designers in their creations, enabling them to understand a space more fully and anticipate problems more quickly.

After funding for the Virtual Sketch Project was secured through a grant from the Technology Enhanced Learning Resourse, engineering student Wayne Huang was hired to write the program, and Ohio Supercomputer was sought to provide the necessary hardware.

Even with money and technology at the disposal of its creators, the project evolved largely through trial and error owing to its unprecedented application of virtual reality technology.

“One of the problems we ran into was how to get (participants) to relate to this new type of space,” said ACCAD director Maria Palazzi, who collaborated with Haase in supervising the project. “Originally, the objects didn’t cast shadows, so the depth perception was unclear.”

To help work out the glitches, Haase collected a handful of undergraduates from the ranks of ACCAD to use the system and provide feedback, making criticisms and suggestions when necessary.

“I had a blast,” said Jennifer McDaniel, a senior who participated in the experiment. “I love the fact that I got to be involved with the project from the very beginning. It seems almost limitless in its potential.”

Increasingly, that potential is being discussed in commercial terms. Using vitual reality, interior architects will be able to introduce clients to the space they have commissioned before a single brick has been laid, and before last-minute changes become to expensive to carry out.

This point was emphasized in a recent article in Metropolis – which is to the design community what Variety is to Hollywood – that named the Virtual Sketch Project one of the “21 Great Design Ideas of the 21st Century.”

“I was flabbergasted,” said Haase, a longtime subscriber to the magazine. “I’m still pinching myself that this project was included on that list.”

After the article was published, Haase was deluged with e-mails from designers who wanted to know how they could get their hands on the system.

For now, the answer is simple – they can’t. In order for the Virtual Sketch Project to be marketed widely, Haase said, he and others working on the system must develop a way to make its software PC compatible. At this time, it runs on a cumbersome and expensive Silicon Graphics workstation.

Haase said he would also like to see the project evolve to where the gloves and head gear the participant wears to navigate through the virtual space become untethered, allowing designers to roam through a large motion-capture theater.

This capability would more realistically evoke the sensation of passing through an actual room.

Until that happens, Haase said he plans to keep himself busy using Virtual Sketch to create a virtual office enabling the user to call up graphs, texts and other information in the surrounding space with a single hand gesture.

And yes, he said he already knows that sounds a lot like the system Tom Cruise uses in “Minority Report” to gather information on would-be murderers.

“I haven’t seen that movie,” Haase said. “But it’s amazing how everyone keeps telling me I should.”