Ubiquitous clerk and virtual planning office — Significance of actual products

This paper describes the virtual planning office “VPO” from the viewpoint of the quality of spatial comfort “QoSC” toward supplying attractive products for consumers, and constructs a prototype of the VPO system. In addition, the validity of the actual products' effects the VPO focuses on is verified through the prototype. The VPO is a new concept that sends consumers' preference on actual products to suppliers. The VPO has two agents. One agent is the ubiquitous clerk to extract consumers' preference on actual products in a shop. The other agent is the virtual designer that provides the consumers' preference information to the suppliers in a real planning office. In verification experiments, subjects draw designs of favorite T-shirts under different conditions, i.e., with/without actual T-shirts. After that, the each subject evaluates which design reflects the subject's preference best. The results show most subjects draw preferable designs with actual products rather than without them (p<;0.01). Additionally, it is found that 88% of the subjects feel that actual products are useful to express their preference from answers of a post-test questionnaire. Consequently, significance of actual products and the VPO's potential to realize supplying preferable products are presented.