Virtual Prototyping of Shoes

Industrial product design usually involves two phases: artistic design and technical design. Because artistic designers are concerned mainly with integrating aesthetics and functionality, design concepts usually must be modified to satisfy technical constraints. Whereas technical design commonly employs a digital prototype, artistic design might not require a digital model. Although today´s modeling systems offer many possibilities to create virtual models, their interfaces differ too much from traditional approaches to gain great acceptance from artistic designers. So, early design phases often suffer from inefficient workflows because of the lack of digital models; for ex ample, designers might need to recreate the artistic model several times. A proposed 3D user interface mimics a shoe designer´s conventional work style. The methods and concepts developed for this interface are applicable to other areas- for example, designing car interiors or cockpits.