Visuo-haptic set-up for usability analysis of industrial products

Virtual Reality (VR) technologies are able to support and facilitate the Participatory Design of industrial products by allowing designers to involve the final users of a product at the early design stages, without the need of a physical mock-up and with the advantage of being able to assess several design options. In some previous works, we have described a methodology and a system (called VP2PaD: Virtual Prototyping oriented to Participatory Design) for the usability evaluation of an industrial product based on the use of virtual prototypes. One of the main limitations of VP2PaD is the absence of tactile feedback, which complicates the user's interaction with the interface of the virtual product.This paper presents the continuation of these works, describing the first steps in the development of a new system, based on a haptic device and an augmented reality display, that aims to improve the effectiveness of VP2PaD, especially in terms of user-friendliness of the interaction devices. Thanks to the haptic device, the user may feel the presence and the contact with interface widgets like buttons and knobs. Moreover, with augmented reality the virtual product may be displayed in a real context and the user may see his/her own hand touching the digital objects. This approach presents several challenges related to the implementation of the visuo-haptic augmented reality setup. The rendering pipeline has to be modified in order to delete the haptic device from the scene and, at the same time, to display correctly the real hand avoiding any wrong occlusion by the virtual objects. In order to solve these problems, we consider ImageBased Rendering (IBR) techniques.The elimination of the haptic device from the augmented reality scene, together with the collocation of the user’s hand and the virtual object, notably enhance the friendliness of the interface. As a result, the user can focus on testing the virtual product, without distractive elements from the setup.