Consumer Subjective Impressions in Virtual Reality Environments: The Role of the Visualization Technique in Product Evaluation

The availability and affordability of consumer virtual reality (VR) devices have fueled their adoption during the product design process. High fidelity virtual prototypes can be created more quickly and are more cost-effective than using traditional methods, but certain product features are still difficult to evaluate, resulting in perceptual differences when a product is assessed using different visualization techniques. In this paper, we report two case studies in which a group of participants evaluated different designs of a product typology (i.e., a watering can) as presented in VR, VR with passive haptics (VRPH) and in a real setting (R) for the first case study, and VR and R for the second case study. The semantic differential technique was used for product evaluation, and an inferential statistical method using aligned rank transform (ART) proceedings was applied to determine perceptual differences between groups. Our results showed that product characteristics assessed by touch are the most susceptible to being affected by the environment, while the user background can have an effect in some product features.