Tag Archives: requirements

VR Application Concepts

Posted on by
Reply

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.

Case Study 1: Workshop Structure

Posted on by
1

Following the kick-off meeting, the next step in the first case study is a workshop. The aim of this workshop is illustrated below.

Aim of the workshop: exchange information, knowledge and experiences between designers and researcher.

The illustration shows the designer’s perspective and the researcher’s perspective. All the sessions up to now were very useful in providing these two parties with insights in to each other’s domain; the company internships allowed the researcher to look around in the designers’ context, the VR demo session provided designers with an overview of VR technologies. The aim of the workshop is to let both sources of knowledge, information and experience come together and discuss explicit combinations of design tasks and VR technologies, in order to identify VR tool opportunities.

To do this, I decided to follow a participatory design approach, in which I am the designer (of the future VR design tool) and the designers are the users (end users of the VR design tool). As you may know, participatory design actively involves end users in the (conceptual) design process. For the upcoming workshop the plan is to use a method described by Iacucci et al (2000) and more recently by Urnes et al (2002), involving a miniature environment in which users ‘act out’ scenarios using puppets, objects and other artefacts.

The animated storyboards presented in a previous post will be used as examples to show my perspective; how do I envision VR to be useful for design tasks? The explicit visualisation method makes it more easy to get positive or negative feedback. Similarly, the workshop participants will be asked to do the same from their perspective; act out the  design tasks that could be supported by VR tools. By discussing the resulting scenarios and performances, more detailed requirements and expectations are expected to be found.