User Experience Assessment on Virtual-Reality Robot-Assisted Smart Hybrid Prototype of a Vehicle Trunk Lid

Abstract

Engineering tasks in product development are becoming increasingly complex and must consider the individualization of products, the adaptability to customer requirements, shortened development times and high product quality standards. CAD and CAE models enable computer-based modeling and testing of virtual prototypes, replacing physical prototypes, leading to reduced manufacturing cost and development times. However, possibilities to perform user studies for quality testing with solely virtual prototypes are limited. Smart Hybrid Prototyping (SHP) combines functional virtual prototyping with extended reality technologies and haptic interaction features, enabling early multimodal design testing. The aim is to design future products faster and more cost-effectively by integrating user tests on SHP prototypes at an early stage, reducing the number of development steps and avoiding changes at later phases in product development. To achieve this goal a hybrid prototype was developed by the authors as part of the public research project “ RobVRAR” . The hybrid prototype simulates the opening and closing behavior of an automotive trunk lid, offers haptic interaction features through a robot arm and displays 3D-models of the vehicle in real-time in virtual reality (VR). Subsequently a user study comparing a real trunk lid with our prototype was conducted to investigate the quality of user experience.