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Virtual reality (VR) is among the main technologies revolutionizing numerous sectors, including tourism. In the latter context, virtual tours (VTs) are finding increasing application. Providing an immersive and realistic human–machine interaction, VR tours can bring visitors to virtually experience destination areas. The proposed research presents a theoretical and empirical investigation of the role played by some technical VR features (i.e., presence, immersion, ease-of-use) on VR visitors’ enjoyment, satisfaction, and, accordingly, on the physical visit intention of the production site and neighboring areas. After having experienced a 360-degree VR tour of a food production site, created specifically for this study, 140 visitors were surveyed online. Results—emerging from a PLS structural equation model—show that immersion and presence both directly impact the enjoyment and indirectly the user’s VR tour satisfaction and visit intention. Further, if the VR tour is perceived as easy to use, it influences visitors’ satisfaction and physical visit intention. This study contributes to the novel VR literature, applied in the tourism sector, evidencing how immersive and enjoyable scenarios, experienced via widespread devices such as smartphones, may impact tourists’ choices. In food tourism, VR technologies can be fundamental in attracting new visitors to the production sites and neighboring areas.

Nowadays companies have to face a competitive market that requires small volumes with a high level of customisations. In this context, assembly quality and timeliness is crucial. To guarantee flexibility and personalization, manual operations still have a crucial role for a lot of manufacturing sectors, so that workers’ conditions and ergonomics are important factors to achieve a better product quality and overall cost reduction. Ergonomics evaluation in manufacturing is a challenging and expensive activity that requires a transdisciplinary approach, to merge technical and social sciences to finally have a consolidated and reliable evaluation. This paper compared two digital human simulations tools offered by Siemens Tecnomatix: Jack and Process Simulate. They were applied on the same industrial case study, concerning the hood assembly of an agricultural machine, comparing results on ergonomics reports and usage time. Results confirmed the advantage of adopting a digital approach to predict the human effort and ergonomic risk related to a series of tasks. At the same time, they showed the major strengths and weaknesses of the two analysed tools and defined how they can be successfully adopted by companies. The paper finally provided guidelines to drive companies in choosing the best tool according to their needs.

Today, virtual reality and augmented reality can allow people to interact with products and places in a very realistic way. In this direction, the use of immersive virtual tours (VTs) can improve the users’ experience, their perceptions, attitudes and even intended behaviours as potential or actual consumers. The paper focuses on a traditional Italian cheese product and defines a transdisciplinary, multimodal approach where VT helps the remote customer experience based on a VT application to virtually visit a Parmigiano Reggiano cheese dairy, using cutting-edge virtual reality set-up. The paper describes how to create a virtual tour of industrial plants by mapping the main actions, from the storytelling definition, to the plant digitization, until the creation of the virtual, immersive and multimodal application using Unity3D. The VT combines visual experience with gesture recognition and audio stimulation, adding also olfactory cues, in order to create an interactive and realistic experience.

Successful interaction with complex processes, like those in the modern factory, is based on the system's ability to satisfy the user needs during human tasks, mainly related to performances, physical comfort, usability, accessibility, visibility, and mental workload. However, the 'real' user perception is hidden and usually difficult to detect. User eXperience (UX) is a useful concept related to subjective perceptions and responses that result from the interaction with a product, system or process, including users' emotions, beliefs, preferences, perceptions, physical and psychological responses, behaviors and accomplishments that occur before, during and after use. The paper proposes the creation of a User eXperience Index (UXI) to assess the quality of human-system interaction during job tasks and, consequently, evaluate both process and workstation. The proposed approach has been applied to improve the design of assembly human tasks, using a virtual simulated case study focusing on tractor assembly. Tests with users, with different levels of expertise, allowed us to validate the proposed approach and to optimize the assembly task sequence. Results showed how the proposed UXI can validly objectify the workers' experience and can be validly used to improve the design of human tasks.

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Understanding user experience (UX) is essential to design engaging and attractive products, so nowadays has emerged an increasingly interest in user-centred design approach; in this perspective, digital technologies such as Virtual Reality (VR) and Mixed Reality (MR) could help designers and engineers to create a digital prototype through which the user feedback can be considered during the product design stage. This research aims at creating an interactive Digital Twin (DT) using MR to enable a tractor driving simulation and involve real users to carry out an early UX evaluation, with the scope to validate the design of the control dashboard through a transdisciplinary approach. MR combines virtual simulation with real physical hardware devices which the user can interact with and have control through both visual and tactile feedback. The result is a MR simulator that combines virtual contents and physical controls, capable of reproducing a plowing activity close to reality. The principles of UX design was applied to this research for a continuous and dynamic UX evaluation during the project development.