Tag Archives: virtual reality

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.

Meeting with TNO

Posted on by
Reply

Today I (Sub Project B) had a meeting with people from TNO. TNO is “an independent research organisation whose expertise and research make an important contribution to the competitiveness of companies and organisations, to the economy and to the quality of society as a whole” (from their website). I met two people at the JVRC conference in Nottingham, and was invited to talk about the VR research done for the REPAR project to a bigger audience within TNO.

TNO participates in the Manuvar project, which is a European project aiming to provide “ergonomics, safety, work assistance and training in the manufacturing and service industries”. With a specific focus on VR and AR, there are several mutual interests between the projects.

Ergonomics analysis tools

After the presentation and discussion with some interesting topics, TNO demonstrated several analysis tools, particularly targeting ergonomics. It was interesting to see the similarities between their setups and some of the ideas we have/had for the REPAR companies, even though we are targeting different parts of the design process. Most importantly, both try to support the process with relatively low-end VR solutions, rather than pushing in high-end and/or new VR technologies.

VR Demo Session: Results

Posted on by
Reply

The VR demonstration session was held on Wednesday, April 28 2010. The aim of this session was to show various examples of VR applications to the four industrial partners. Customized VR demos were created for each partner, based on findings from the company internships. The applications ranged from an augmented reality setup to an immersive drive simulator, a motion tracking suit, a virtual usability lab and a virtual ‘experience lab’.

Between the demo’s the company representatives were asked for feedback on the demo (from a company perspective as well as a cross-company perspective). In addition to this discussion, all participants filled out an evaluation form which was processed afterwards.

Tag cloud of the feedback on the VR demonstrations.

Results?

The evaluation forms provided some insight about the effectiveness of the session; I was particularly interested in how well the examples matched the companies needs. The following table shows how ‘useful’ the companies think the demonstrations were, and how they rated the overall application.

Results of the VR demo session, expressed in 'usefulness' and an overall rating.

From the ‘usefulness’ rating it is concluded that all the demo’s match the company needs and expectations; all companies rate their ‘own’ demo most useful. The overall rating however shows that two of the four companies do not think their own demo is the best (overall) demonstration. I think this is because the ‘rating’ triggered participants to give feedback on the application, so most of the ratings included comments like “It’s a 6/10, but it would be an 8 if you improved this and this”. On the whole it seems that the applications perfectly served the goal of triggering discussions, concrete feedback and new ideas.

After the four individual demonstrations the participants were involved in a group discussion. The discussion allowed each company to share their thoughts on the usefulness, problems and opportunities they identified during the session. The discussion initially focused on technical details (“How long does it take to develop these applications?”, “how did you create them?”). Though interesting, this was not the aim of this talk; I intended to get an idea of where and when in the design process these VR applications could be useful. After a while the discussion did turn this way, resulting in the following findings.

  • Companies do not like to rely on external services or companies for applying VR; the tools should be simple enough to be used internally, simply because of time restrictions.
  • Most participants agree that from what they’ve seen in the demos, VR offers added value for concept presentation tasks, possibly even after the R&D process (sales, marketing, showroom).
  • The virtual usability lab and the virtual experience lab showed the advantages of using VR for evaluating product concepts in an early stage of development.
  • To make VR tools more useful, they should include
    • Easy modeling (or importing) of virtual artefacts
    • Multi-user support, instead of a single user perspective
    • Scenario playing, scripted users, intelligence, etcetera

Conclusion

The VR demonstration was a very useful step between the company internships and the start of the company case studies. Not only does it provide a reference for all the participants (What is VR, how could it help you?) but it also adds to forming a vision regarding the development of VR design tools. From the discussion it became clear that VR tools could facilitate in various presentation and evaluation tasks.