Products experience: how can Virtual Prototyping improve usability testing?

During product development, usability tests allow the investigation of product performance in terms of effectiveness and user satisfaction. Virtual Reality (VR) systems provide new modes of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) that can support usability testing at the early design stages by adopting virtual prototypes to simulate product ex- perience. The problem is that only posture and occlusion parameters can be easily measured while the emotional and af- fective dimension is difficult to be assessed. In this context, the present paper focuses on two objectives. Firstly, it aims at investigating which product attributes stimulate affective user response by defining a structured protocol to analyze how sample users experience product at- tributes determining affordance and synaesthesia qualities. Then, real and virtual environments are compared in order to address VR systems improvements. Consequently, the second goal is to define a new VR-based environment for usabil- ity testing by considering a proper set of existing technologies integrated with a proposed multi-sensorial system for materials texture and roughness perception. Protocol experimentations are carried out in household appliances.