Service Field Simulator: Virtual Environment Display System for Analyzing Human Behavior in Service Fields

This paper describes a virtual reality system for analyzing human behavior in service fields and its two practical use cases. Sensing and analyzing human behavior are very useful for evaluating and improving processes and environment of services. However, a change of service process and environment carries some risks. If we can evaluate them in advance, we can reduce the risks. Therefore, we have been developing a service field simulator using virtual reality technologies. A person who experiences the virtual service field is surrounded by displays in 360° not for losing sense of direction during ‘walking around’ the environment. He or she can walk around the virtual environment by walking-in-place motion. The direction of travel is decided with the body direction. In this paper, we introduce our new implementation of the simulator. We replaced four image projectors to 40 liquid crystal displays for improving resolution of virtual environment. New setting up can provide sufficient resolution to evaluate package design of products in the virtual retail store. We also replaced a wearable sensor module for detecting walking-in-place motion into RGB-D sensors set on a frame of the simulator. It reduces number of the sensors attached to the person and makes it easier to experience the virtual environment. In order to show feasibility of our concept of the service field simulator, this paper also describes two use cases of the simulator. In the first use case, we use the simulator with eye-tracking device for analyzing buying behavior in a drag store. In the second use case, we use the simulator with EEG for studying a method for evaluating human interest to an environment.