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In the product development process one of the crucial phases is the evaluation of the design of the product that must satisfy the marketing targets based on the users' needs analysis. It is commonly acknowledged that a product is successful if people like and buy it. In the phase of ideation of a new product, it is paramount to test functionality and performances as well as the users' appreciation and feeling towards the new product. More specifically, in the case of consumer products characterised by a plurality of offers, interaction and experience should be addressed in addition to function and aesthetics in the user studies. Recent research has focused on the study of the user's emotional reaction when interacting and experiencing products, which is correlated with the global appreciation of the product and of its attributes. This paper presents an emotional engineering methodology using interactive virtual prototyping for evaluating the user experience and the emotional response with newly designed products early in the development process. The methodology suggests a way to optimise those aspects at the product concept phase. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Designing physical interfaces, like the doors of consumer products, able to elicit a positive experience when interacting with them, is now becoming a key priority for design teams. One of the main difficulties of this activity consists of translating all the qualitative perceptual feedback that can be captured from the customers into quantitative specifications. Performing this translation is not an easy task since there are still no effective tools, methodologies or approaches able to guide designers in accomplishing this goal. To overcome this lack a reverse engineering-based approach is proposed. This one guides designers towards the modelling, parameterisation and reproduction of the behaviour of the product interface to be redesigned, within a multisensory virtual environment. The intent is to let the user experience different behaviours in order to ask them to identify the desired one or to express preferences for updating it in real-time according to indications provided. At the same time a detailed physics model, built by the designer, is used to convert this desired behaviour, into detailed quantitative design specifications. The method is defined as a reverse engineering one for two main reasons: first the new interaction is derived on the basis of the behaviour of an existing interface, taken as reference, and second a reverse engineering of the user's perceptual preferences is applied to derive new specifications. A case study is discussed to demonstrate the method effectiveness and to highlight its limitations. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In common industrial practice the definition of shapes of styling products is performed by product designers. They usually produce aesthetic shapes by handcrafting scale models made of malleable material like clay, and often expensive physical prototypes are also manufactured. The paper describes a Desktop Mechatronic System (DMS) that has been conceived to support designers in the creation, evaluation and modification of aesthetic virtual shapes. The objective in designing this system is to develop a system allowing a continuous and smooth free hand physical interaction with a virtual shape, which is rendered through a dynamic cross-sectional contour or curve in three-dimensional (3D) space. The DMS is a useful tool for designers, who are not certain about the quality of the shape of the product, and can use it for testing out ideas. The DMS consists of a servo-actuated developable metallic strip, which reproduces 3D cross-sectional contours, which has been devised and implemented by using the Minimal Energy Curve (MEC) spline approach in which the equidistant interpolation points scheme has been adopted to imitate the virtual object created via a Computer Aided Design (CAD) tool on a physical bendable strip-like surface. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper describes an application based on Virtual and Augmented Reality technologies specifically developed to support maintenance operations of industrial products. Two scenarios have been proposed. In the first an operator learns how to perform a maintenance operation in a multimodal Virtual Reality environment that mixes a traditional instruction manual with the simulation, based on visual and haptic technologies, of the maintenance training task. In the second scenario, a skilled user operating in a multimodal Virtual Reality environment can remotely train another operator who sees the instructions about how the operations should be correctly performed, which are superimposed onto the real product. The paper presents the development of the application as well as its testing with users. Furthermore limits and potentialities of the use of Virtual and Augmented Reality technologies for training operators for product maintenance are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the domain of industrial product development, products have been traditionally communicated to final users by means of technical drawings, sketches and physical prototypes. Recently, companies have tended to develop digital versions of products, which can be used with the purpose of communicating a new product to users, and also with the aim of allowing users to evaluate the product and its variants before its physical construction. Virtual prototyping is a relatively recent practice used in various industrial domains, which aims at anticipating a product that does not exist in reality yet. This practice can be used for evaluating the aesthetic quality of a product, its functional features and also its ergonomic and usability aspects. Current virtual reality technology well supports the implementation of effective virtual prototypes. In fact, one can touch, move, manipulate, and operate the virtual prototypes of products, such as household appliances, electronic devices, etc., with a good degree of realism. In order to do this, the interaction with virtual prototypes is multimodal and multisensory, and is often based on the combination of visual, haptic and auditory modalities. This paper shows how virtual prototypes can be used instead of physical artefacts or mock-ups for the communication of a new product or of variants of an existing product, and for the preliminary evaluation of its usage. The effectiveness of this practice is proved by tests performed by users. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: The paper presents two applications of haptic technologies to demonstrate how they can increase human computer interaction during different steps of design process. The first application aims at developing a system to generate digital shapes by manipulating haptic tools that resemble the physical ones that the modelers use in everyday work. The second is focused on the use of haptic interfaces to evaluate ergonomics of virtual products control boards. We designed and developed the mentioned haptic devices; the first uses two FCS HapticMaster equipped with a innovative strong and stiff 6 DOF device carrying simulated clay modeling tools. The second is an “ad hoc” mechatronic device able to simulate some controls with rotary motions (knobs). The described haptic devices are integrated in more complex virtual reality applications; the paper describes their architecture and the methodologies proposed to simulate material shaping and ergonomic validation. The main aspects of haptic modeling and rendering are also discussed. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

The design of large dams is a collaborative activity with relevant social and political implications. Planning such large infrastructures requires involving all the interested stakeholders, making shared decisions, tracing the design process. There are currently not many Virtual Prototyping tools to support this collaborative design process. In this paper, we propose a participated planning support system based on mobile and Augmented Reality technologies which allows different stakeholders to take part in the review of a large dam project through an application that automatically acquires information available online, allows all stakeholders to share information, and finally records everything for a subsequent analysis. The development of the application, as well as its use in two case studies and a user study, are described in the paper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Several haptic devices have been developed in recent years in order to reproduce the sensation of physical contact with virtual objects. Many of these devices are point-based, and some haptic interfaces behave like small surfaces that conform to a virtual shape. None of these allow a full-hand contact with the shape, and they are, in general, too small to render big surfaces. The simulation of tasks, such as the exploration of aesthetic surfaces made by industrial designers in order to check the quality of prototypes, require full-hand contact with the shape on a one-to-one scaled representation of the object. These explorations follow trajectories that can be approximated with planar or geodesic curves. In this paper, we describe the design and implementation of a linear haptic device that is able to render these trajectories. The device is part of a multimodal system including stereoscopic visualization that allows visual representation of the entire surface. Industrial designers use the system for checking the quality of shapes while exploiting their manual and visual skills. The system has been tested by industrial designers and the results are reported in this paper. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]