Evaluation of customer impressions using virtual prototypes in the internet environment

This study aims to investigate a cost effective and efficient way of analyzing customer impressions on design alternatives by incorporating the benefits of virtual prototyping into the Internet-based experimental environment. It is hypothesized that the results of the Internet-based experiment using the images of virtual prototypes are comparable to those of the virtual reality-based environment using virtual prototypes. Two experiments were conducted. In the virtual reality environment, participants were employed to evaluate virtual prototypes while in the Internet environment participants evaluated images of the same virtual prototypes from their own places. For each experiment, 16 male participants were employed to evaluate 32 different virtual prototypes generated from the combination of 17 design elements of automobile interior. The results of the experiments indicated that there were no significant differences between the two experimental methods while the Internet environment-based method could save considerable time and efforts for experimentation. This study concludes that the Internet-based evaluation method using the images of virtual prototypes could be a cost effective and efficient way of analyzing customer impressions on design alternatives. Relevance to Industry: This study showed that the results of the Internet-based evaluation method using the images of virtual prototypes are comparable to those of the virtual reality-based method using real virtual prototypes. The Internet-based evaluation method could be used as a cost effective and efficient way of collecting and analyzing various customers' impressions on design alternatives at the early stage of product development process. (C) 2010 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.