Affective property evaluation of virtual product designs

In addition to the intended functionality of the product, its affective properties (or "Kansei") have emerged as important evaluation criteria for the successful marketing of the product. Recently, "immersive" virtual reality systems have been suggested as an ideal platform for affective analysis of an evolving design because of, among other things, the natural style of interaction they offer when examining the product. In this paper, we compare the effectiveness of three types of virtual environments for evaluating the affective properties of mobile phones to that of the real. Each virtual environment offers different degrees of realism in terms of visual, aural, and tactile aspects. Our experiment has shown that the virtual affective evaluation results correlated very highly with that of the real, and but no statistically significant difference could be found between the three systems. This finding was contrary to our initial thought and the conventional notion that the characteristics of immersive virtual reality systems would contribute to making it a better platform for virtual evaluation of product designs. Thus, it goes to say that employing immersive systems is not necessarily cost effective solution for affective analysis of product designs (desktop VR system suffices).