User evaluation of a tiny house design through eye-tracking-integrated virtual reality: the role of sense of presence, visual behaviour and informative context

Virtual Reality is used in design for both supporting design reviews and interacting with products being designed. The interactions Virtual Reality enables are often found engaging and this might affect product evaluation, as experiencing a virtual environment can be the prevalent element of an experience. This paper investigated to what extent product evaluations are affected by the sense of presence enabled by Virtual Reality, the duration of interactions with the whole products and its features, and the product information provided after exposure to the virtual environment. These effects were tested through an experiment involving the virtual tour of a tiny house whose interior was extracted through 360 degrees images, which represents an element of originality of the paper, followed by administering participants informative stimuli. All these phases were supported by eye-tracking, also thanks to the use equipment combining Virtual Reality and eye-tracking, hitherto poorly used in design research, in the first part of the experiment. Based on the experiment results, the effects studied were limited to the gazing of few design elements on some product evaluation dimensions. These findings suggest that Virtual Reality can provide a strong product perception irrespective of sense of presence and other phenomena taking place during product interaction. This is particularly stressed by the failure of informative stimuli to make experiment participants modify the initial evaluations made just after the virtual tour. Overall, the outcomes of this study encourage the use of Virtual Reality for design interaction tasks, especially in relation to environments and building interiors.