Tag Archives: case study 2

The Virtual Persona Application

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While case study 3 of Sub Project B is taking shape after the last workshop, there is also some progress in finalising the result of the previous case study. The Virtual Persona application has been cleaned up and made ready for use within the company. In addition to a code clean-up and proper documentation, a Developers Guide and Use Guide are being written in order to support adoption of the application by the company.

There are also plans to release a more generic version of the virtual environment that can be used by anyone to create their own Virtual Persona application.

The Virtual Persona application after a code clean-up in Blender.

Cross Company Evaluation 2

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The second Cross-Company Evaluation (CCE2) took place on Wednesday September 5, 2012 in the VR-Lab of Twente University. It was attended by representatives from the three primary industrial partners as well as two representatives from AgentschapNL.  Just like CCE1, this session has been an important and successful milestone in the research of Sub Project B. The researcher would once again like to thank all the participants for attending the session.

Session Structure

The session consisted of two parts.

  1. Presentation – In the first part of the session, the researcher presented a summary of the second case study covering the main events in the case study, such as the group workshop and the test sessions. The presentation also introduced the topic of the case study, namely Virtual Personas. Personas are detailed (written) descriptions of a user, and intended to inform designers about who they are designing for. Virtual personas are digital representations of personas (in 3d avatars) that can act out use scenarios in a fully virtual world.
  2. Use Case – A prototype of this application that had been developed during the case study (see figures) was demonstrated to the audience. After this quick introduction, the participants were asked to carry out a simple use case with the tool, featuring a design assignment similar to the one carried out during the ‘real’ case study. This allowed participants to experience what it is like to use the Virtual Persona tool.

Participants operating the Virtual Persona tool

Review

The topic of ‘personas’ turned out to be quite interesting for all parties involved. One of the other two companies has been using personas quite successfully and shared insights about how they managed to do so. Other participants, who had only limited experience with personas (but are interested in using them in their design process) benefit from hearing these experiences.

The Virtual Persona tool in the VR lab

During the interactive part of the session the two non-case study companies participated in a mini use case to experience the tool themselves. Both groups were joined by people from the case study company, who helped out with getting to know the tool and with providing additional insights from their own use case. Most of the time was spent on understanding how to control the avatars and the virtual world. As a result, the mini use cases were somewhat more limited in terms of generating ideas, but gave the participants an idea of what it is like to use the Virtual Persona tool.

After the interactive part of the session, the participating groups were asked to describe how their company (or product design process) could benefit from Virtual Personas; what benefits are anticipated, would the application be similar to the one developed during the case study, and what kind of tools would be available to realise this application? The results of these brainstorms were shared during a group discussion in which all companies participated.

Preliminary Findings

The following is concluded from the CCE2 session:

  • Personas (non-virtual) were well received among the participants; positive and negative experiences with personas were shared even before discussing virtual personas.
  • Designers with prior experience with ‘traditional’ personas identified several advantages of virtual personas; it helps with focussing designers on specific personas, provides a richer visualisation and allows for personas to be placed in various ‘situations’ (e.g. different rooms, locations, events, etc.)
  • The tool (in particular the avatar controls) requires sufficient training before virtual personas can really be used in a session. This level of training was achieved during the case study (as more time was available), but not during the mini use-cases carried out during the CCE.

In addition to the above preliminary findings, insights will be derived by reviewing session recordings and the forms that were filled out during the session.

 

Virtual Personas: Expert Review

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On May 24 an expert review session was organised with the company involved in case study 2 of REPAR Sub Project B. The aim of this expert review was to present the current state of the VR application prototype, and discuss the approach for the final test session.

The session started with a quick introduction to the topic of virtual personas, and proceeded with a proposal for the outline of the test session and a demonstration of the VR application. The application itself was projected on a large screen in front of the participants, and participants were invited to try out the application themselves.

The envisioned use of the Virtual Personas application in a group meeting.

Issues

This expert review identified the following issues in the current application and the proposed approach for the test session.

  1. The current application does not provide sufficiently recognisable personas or characters. The visual representations (the avatars) are too similar to each other as they only differ in clothes. To further improve this, introductory videos of the personas should also be shown to session participants.
  2. In order to act-out scenarios or storyboards there should be additional ‘modes’ for the personas. The current application allows the persona to sit, lay down or walk, but it should also be posssible to act-out ‘reading a book’ or ‘watching TV’.
  3. During the test session the use of the application should be embedded between pre-application and post-application activities.
    1. Before using the application, participants should already have thought about what kind of scenario they want to act-out in the virtual environment. This could for instance be achieved by letting them write or sketch initial scenarios.
    2. After using the application to act-out the scenarios with different personas, the participants should be able to store, review and possibly edit the resulting scenarios. They could be recorded as a video, but ideally the scenarios could still be edited afterwards; in this case, advanced concepts could be placed back in the scenario after several design iterations.

These issues are to be resolved before the final test session.

 

 

Virtual Personas

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The second case study of sub project B (VR) reached a first milestone. After discussing various VR applications in a previous meeting, a functional prototype of the Virtual Personas application was demonstrated to the company. The Virtual Persona application allows designers (engineers, management, marketing, etc.) to see and control virtual avatars of existing personas in current and future use scenarios. The application intends to bring personas ‘alive’ in a virtual environment (instead of just describing them on paper) and lets designers experience scenarios from a persona’s point of view. A persona can include physical user characteristics (e.g. weight, length, age) but also behavioural characteristics, such as the level of knowledge of electronics, the level of intelligence, etc.

The virtual avatar (outside the truck) can be controlled with a Kinect interface

Prototype

The prototype of this application consists of the following elements;

  1. A virtual world  (A virtual city with roads, highways, etc. was created for this specific case study)
  2. Several virtual avatars, representing existing personas
  3. A motion capture interface that allows the avatars to be controlled by designers (using a Kinect)

A short video demonstrating the prototype is available here.

The setup is envisioned to be used by a group (5-10) of designers in early stage design meetings. The application enables the designers to act out scenarios themselves (using the motion tracking), but at the same time forces designers to act and think from the perspective of a particular persona. As such, it can be useful to discuss questions like “would persona 3 do with this new concept”, or “will this particular concept work with all our personas?”. Though it will probably not result in direct design solutions, it should help the designers in thinking from a user’s point of view, and as a result trigger discussions in the design meeting.

Next Steps

The prototype demonstration resulted in useful feedback and pointers for future work. Firstly, the personas need sufficient introduction before using the tool. Right now, the virtual avatars are simply dropped into the virtual world, without any introduction. A short movie or animation should briefly introduce the primary characteristics of each avatar. Secondly, the current method of interaction with the avatar (motion tracking) may not be the most useful one. Alternatively, some of the avatar actions could be done with a mouse, by a ‘session operator’. For the upcoming test sessions, a hybrid interface (e.g. mouse and Kinect) will be implemented to be able to experience the difference between these two interfaces.

In the two upcoming meetings, a pre-test with a refined version of the prototype will be carried out, followed by a real design session involving a larger group of designers/engineers and a relevant test case.

VR Application Concepts

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Sub Project B is currently involved in the second case study. Recently the results of the VR exploration workshop have been processed. The storyboards created in the workshop are used to create VR application concepts specifically designed for the company. These applications were presented to and discussed with company representatives in a meeting in December 2011.

Application Themes

A thorough analysis of the individual storyboards provided the researcher with insights in lower-level requirements and ideas for VR applications. Rather than following the group storyboards, which turned out to be too generic/abstract to derrive applications from, the researcher introduced three recurring themes that were found in the storyboards:

  1. Use VR to increase user involvement
  2. Use VR to facilitate interdisciplinary design meetings
  3. Providing a virtual evaluation platform for HMI concepts

Note: For confidentiality reasons the themes are not described in full detail.

The themes provide the basis for specific VR Applications. The three applications were introduced one by one, by showing a short introduction, an application outline (in terms of required steps, tools and activities and a short demonstration movie).

Discussion & Selection

After introducing and discussing the three application directions, the meeting continued with selecting one direction for further use in the case study of sub project B. The first two directions were found to be interesting; they provide a good combination of new knowledge and the potential re-use of existing infrastructure available within the company. After reviewing the two directions from a research as well as an industrial point of view, it was decided to focus on the first application direction, namely to use VR to improve user involvement.

A mockup of the 'Virtual Persona' concept (from Euro Truck Simulator 2)

This direction uses VR to virtually represent end-users in the design process, by-passing some of the drawbacks of user involvement (e.g. time constraints, confidentiality, etc.) that are currently keeping the company from actively involving end-users. For now, the concept is called ‘Virtual Persona’ and will be further developed in the case study.

VR Exploration Workshop for Case Study 2

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In parallel to the Cross Company Evaluation of the results of the first case study, Sub Project B initiated the second case study during a kick-off meeting with company representatives.The company involved in the new case study is active in automotive design. During the kick-off meeting initial focus points for the case study and an overall planning and approach were presented. Following this kick-off meeting, a ‘VR Exploration Workshop’ was organised. The workshop is based on the workshop held with the first company, with some small improvements and modifications.

Objective & Structure

The primary aim of the workshop is to introduce company employees from various disciplines to a wide range of VR technologies and let them explore how VR could improve early stage design tasks in their design process. The first part of the workshop focuses on problems and challenges found in the current design practice. The second part of the workshop lets participants connect VR technologies to these problems, and asks them to clarify their ideas in terms of envisioned tools, users, tasks, etc.

An important aspect of the workshop is the generation of scenarios. Scenarios describe a certain context, for instance a specific design event or design case, in which actors, events and artefacts are involved. The participants use scenarios (expressed in storyboards) to clarify the relevance of their problems and also to depict specific aspects of their solutions. Scenarios stimulate  storytelling, which makes understanding their ideas easier.

Results

The workshop took place on a Friday afternoon at the company. In addition to eight participants and the facilitator, the two other REPAR researchers were also involved in observing and facilitating. After a short introduction of the REPAR project and sub project B in particular (some of the participants were unfamiliar with the project), the presenter outlined the purpose of the workshop and explained how storyboards would play a central role in it.

Example (individual) storyboard: It shows some of the new elements, added after the previous Case Study. We used text balloons and user avatars to easily allow participants to annotate the frames.

The next step in the workshop involved reading `Trigger Cards’. Trigger cards contain quotes and statements from interviews held in an earlier stage of the research project, and should trigger participants to start thinking about certain problems or opportunities. Each participant was shown each card (40 cards in total) by passing them on in a chain-like fashion. The exercise prooved to be a nice way to get the workshop started and to trigger initial responses. Most of the participants were able to succesfully create a storyboard based on these trigger cards.

Participants working on storyboards

After a short break the participants started to work on group storyboards. Storyboard ‘posters’ were handed out, and each group was given a new set of cards to create their final storyboards. Within each group, the individual storyboards were first presented to eachother to identify similarities. These discussions helped shaping the ‘group’ identity, and with understanding each others views on the storyboards. After discussing the individual storyboards the groups started to merge their ideas in a final presentation, using the posters and a final group storyboard.

Next Steps

The session was wrapped up by letting each group present and explain their storyboard. These short presentations added a lot of insights to the group work, and indicate the importance of also thorougly analysing the individual storyboards. The resulting individual and group storyboards will be used to develop more concrete VR applications for the company, presented and discussed in a follow-up meeting.