Design evaluation of digital consumer products using virtual reality-based functional behaviour simulation

Abstract

To realize the virtual design and prototyping of every digital consumer product faithfully, it is important to allow all the people involved in the design process to experience its realistic appearance and functional behaviour. Proposed in this paper is a novel approach to design evaluation of a digital consumer product, which can satisfy such requirements using virtual reality-based functional behaviour simulation. In the approach, a product model, multimedia contents data, a functional behaviour model and a finite state machine are combined to constitute the virtual product model of a product of interest. A state transition methodology is adopted to capture the functional behaviour of the product, which is simulated by the finite state machine in a virtual reality environment. Based on the approach, a product design evaluation system has been developed and applied for the design evaluation of various products. A preliminary user study has been conducted to show the usefulness of the proposed approach by comparing it with other approaches using real products and two-dimensional screen prototypes.