It is industrial practice to conduct Design Reviews of product models by
means of Virtual Reality (VR) systems. Especially in the car industry CAVEs
and Power Walls are mandatory tools to visualize the current state of product
models (digital prototypes). However such systems usually display only the
geometric product structure as it is imported from CAD systems. Other
information which are of prime importance for the decision making are usually
not visualized, e.g. requirements, documents, regulations, non-visual
relations between parts and function etc. Such information have to be looked
up in external systems, e.g. product data management systems or other
repositories. In order to improve the utility and efficiency of VR-based
Design Reviews, such media breaks should be prevented and all necessary data
should be available in the immersive environement. The present work provides
an explorative study on possible visualization techniques for combined
graphical and textual information within a CAVE. 21 subjects were asked to
arrange product structures of a given product in 3d space, using various 3d
interaction techniques. The resulting product structures were analysed and
grouped by means of a category system. The results vary among others in terms
of the visualizations of the product structure, the relations between words
and the product model and the use of depth. Future research questions are
derived from the results which take user experience and perceptual issues
into account