Affective property evaluation of virtual product designs

In addition to the intended functionality of the product, its affective properties (or "Kansei") have emerged as important evaluation criteria for the successful marketing of the product. Recently, "immersive" virtual reality systems have been suggested as an ideal platform for affective analysis of an evolving design because of among other things, the natural style of interaction they offer when examining the product. In this paper, we compare the effectiveness of three types of virtual environments for evaluating the affective properties of mobile phones to that of the real. Each virtual environment offers different degrees of realism in terms of visual, aural, and tactile aspects. Our experiment has shown that the virtual affective evaluation results correlated very highly with that of the real, and but no statistically significant difference could be found between the three systems. This finding was contrary to our initial thought and the conventional notion that the characteristics of immersive virtual reality systems would contribute to making it a better platform for virtual evaluation of product designs. Thus, it goes to say that employing immersive systems is not necessarily cost effective solution for affective analysis of product designs (desktop VR system suffices).

[1]  Paul J. Besl,et al.  A Method for Registration of 3-D Shapes , 1992, IEEE Trans. Pattern Anal. Mach. Intell..

[2]  J. Ladbrook,et al.  Experiencing virtual factories of the future , 2002, Proceedings of the Winter Simulation Conference.

[3]  T. Kuhlen,et al.  Integration of virtual reality based assembly simulation into CAD/CAM environments , 1998, IECON '98. Proceedings of the 24th Annual Conference of the IEEE Industrial Electronics Society (Cat. No.98CH36200).

[4]  Antonella De Angeli,et al.  Integration and synchronization of input modes during multimodal human-computer interaction , 1997, CHI.

[5]  Ken Hinckley,et al.  Passive real-world interface props for neurosurgical visualization , 1994, CHI '94.

[6]  Sung H. Han,et al.  Optimal Balancing of Product Design Features: A Case Study on Mobile Phones , 2002 .

[7]  Marko Heikkinen,et al.  Virtual reality prototyping-a framework for the development of electronics and telecommunication products , 1997, Proceedings 8th IEEE International Workshop on Rapid System Prototyping Shortening the Path from Specification to Prototype.

[8]  Sharon L. Oviatt,et al.  Ten myths of multimodal interaction , 1999, Commun. ACM.

[9]  Gerd Hirzinger,et al.  Registration of CAD-models to images by iterative inverse perspective matching , 1996, Proceedings of 13th International Conference on Pattern Recognition.

[10]  한성호,et al.  Incorporating user satisfaction into the look-and-feel wireless phones , 2001 .

[11]  Rory Stuart,et al.  Design of Virtual Environments , 2001 .

[12]  Myung Hwan Yun,et al.  A Systematic Procedure for Modeling Usability Based on Product Design Variables: A Case Study in Audiovisual Consumer Electronic Products , 2002, International journal of occupational safety and ergonomics : JOSE.

[13]  Mitsuo Nagamachi,et al.  Kansei engineering as a powerful consumer-oriented technology for product development. , 2002, Applied ergonomics.

[14]  Margaret J. Robertson,et al.  Design and Analysis of Experiments , 2006, Handbook of statistics.

[15]  Mark Green,et al.  JDCAD: A highly interactive 3D modeling system , 1994, Comput. Graph..

[16]  Roy Davies,et al.  Applications of systems design using virtual environments , 2002 .

[17]  Michael J. Singer,et al.  Measuring Presence in Virtual Environments: A Presence Questionnaire , 1998, Presence.

[18]  Azriel Rosenfeld,et al.  Segmentation and Estimation of Image Region Properties through Cooperative Hierarchial Computation , 1981, IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics.

[19]  한성호,et al.  Identifying mobile phone design features critical to user satisfaction , 2001 .

[20]  Hunter G. Hoffman,et al.  Physically touching virtual objects using tactile augmentation enhances the realism of virtual environments , 1998, Proceedings. IEEE 1998 Virtual Reality Annual International Symposium (Cat. No.98CB36180).

[21]  Thomas H. Massie,et al.  The PHANToM Haptic Interface: A Device for Probing Virtual Objects , 1994 .