An immersive virtual discrete choice experiment for elicitation of product aesthetics using Gestalt principles

Abstract

This research presents a pilot study that explores the use of quantified Gestalt principles of symmetry, parallelism, and continuity as design variables to evaluate the aesthetics of three-dimensional product representations. To this end, a virtual reality (VR)-based discrete choice experiment was conducted to elicit subjects’ preferences among pairs of bottle forms with diverse Gestalt values. While immersed in the VR environment, 42 participants were able to visually explore the whole forms, thus capturing more information to develop their judgment. Further analysis of the choice data using standard and mixed logit regression with hierarchical Bayes estimation provides initial details on the aesthetic utility of the Gestalt principles in question, their distribution among the sample participants, and the correlation between estimates. Due to the small sample size, the results are not expansible and they only apply to the data set gathered during the experiment. Nevertheless, it is an initial proof of concept which could suggest that symmetry and continuity have a positive aesthetic effect over people, and that parallelism could have opposite aesthetic utilities for women and men. This methodology allows designers to delve into the integration of aesthetics as a quantifiable property in the product development process.

Can co-creation in extended reality technologies facilitate the design process?

“…MR is also referred to as merged reality, hybrid reality or augmented virtuality and has been used across a variety of sectors, including the reconstruction of heritage restoration projects (Huang et al , 2009), augmenting visits to museums and historic buildings (White et al , 2004) and medical training (Albrechta et al , 2013). Other studies have explored social VR (Dorta et al , 2019) co-creating in VR (Ranjbarfard and Heidari Sureshjani, 2018) and using VR in establishing product aesthetics (Valencia-Romero and Lugo, 2017). However, few studies have been found concerning the role of VR and AR in the early conceptual stages of the design process (Ekströmer and Wever, 2019).…”

Customer value in lean product development: Conceptual model for incremental innovations

“…desire to possess, desire to use or to feel good when using. 22,32,[34][35][36][37][38][39][40][41][42][43][46][47][48]51,52…”

“…desire to own or acquire. 22,42,43,[46][47][48]51,52 Concept: It is associated with the ability of a product or service to arouse feelings or affective states in clients. Characteristics:…”

“…(b) Web-based search that was designed to focus on one of the fields that users had revealed to be most important in the first part of the study. This method had more participants (192) compared to the first (52).…”