In packaging design, designers are used to moving between sketches, CAD models and physical prototypes. Each has its own limitations. Digital tools offer flexibility and quick iteration but lack sensory qualities, while physical prototypes offer definition but take time and effort to produce.

Our team was invited to explore how VR might change that balance for a course at the University of Twente. Our client FrieslandCampina identified several limitations in their current process:
- Design and evaluation happen in separate phases, slowing iteration.
- Little co-creation occurs with consumers or internal stakeholders.
- A trade-off exists between physical prototypes (rich in sensory detail but -slow) and digital prototypes (fast but lacking tactility).
- Key experiential qualities — such as weight, grip, shape, opening behavior, texture — are difficult to assess using digital tools alone. 

The central design question became:
How can we merge the speed of digital prototyping with the sensory experience of physical models to enable collaborative, real-time design discussions?

Our exploration started with thinking about what VR could enable over traditional techniques. It allows you to see any CAD model instantly, in full three dimension, in front of you. You can interact with the design, walk around it. And you could evaluate the design in any environment you can think of. This could all shorten the time between concept and prototype.

However, in VR, there is one key component of packaging design missing: sense. You don’t just look at packaging, you hold it. The shape, size, weight, wall thickness all play a role in how one experiences packaging. This is something that digital design process simply could not offer. To bring the different steps of the design process closer together, we explored how we could incorporate this dimension to digital workflows.

In this project, we explored how using a haptic glove (SenseGlove) could help incorporate a sense of sense into digital-first design workflows. Using VR alongside the SenseGlove we built a small proof of concept that allowed users to pick up a virtual package and adjust parameters of it in real time.

Team mate Tijs wearing the SenseGlove with Meta Quest controllers attached in the VR lab

With this concept, users could in potential instantly see a design in front of them, interact with it directly, place it in new virtual environments (a kitchen, a shelf, a bar setup), grab it, and tweak size and proportions without waiting for a new prototype to be ready.

The concept ultimately came together as three connected elements: a virtual design space for adjusting form and volume in real time, contextual environments through VR to explore how the package lives in everyday scenes haptic interaction through the SenseGlove to give the virtual object a sense of presence.

The quality and fidelity of the feedback given by the SenseGlove was still quite low. In our evaluation, users could barely make a distinction between a cylinder and a cube. But as one of our early testers noted, “It feels like I’m holding something.” That small reaction said enough: the virtual object had crossed into physical experience, even with the imperfect technology of that moment.

That shift from observing to holding could open up conversations between designers and end users that would normally require several rounds of mock-ups. It creates room for speculation, for trying things, for testing ideas not through analysis and reasoning but through embodied interaction.

Even in its early (and very rough) form, the prototype showed how virtual and physical qualities could blend into a single design moment. It illustrated how the line between concept and prototype could be much shorter and that design conversations could (or even should) happen around something you can feel, even if it exists only in VR.

In this article I reflect on a university project that I look back on with great enthusiasm. For this project, I collaborated with Niels Bos, Robert Breugelmans, Dick Dekker, Marnix Riepen, and Tijs Zandt. My contribution in this project focused on defining how the experience should feel, what it should enable and shaping the narrative on how these novel interactions could shift the way we design with computers.