Effect of Intermediary Object Use During Collaborative Design Activities of Immersive Applications: Focus on Professional Training Application

Abstract

Industry 4.0 introduces innovative ways of professional training thanks to new technologies such as Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality. Despite improvements, there's still a lack of a good user experience and connection between user needs and these applications. To tackle this problem, designers of such applications must work in a collaborative way integrating final users. It's specifically true during design phases such as scenario creation. But the co-creation of scenario is a difficult task for designers and final users who don't have enough expertise with IT. A solution seems to stand in intermediary objects (IOs) which are well known for their characteristics of mediation, transformation, and representation. We have studied the use of different IOs during a project consisting in designing an immersive professional training application for risk hunting for Stäubli company. We used an IO1 made of an excel sheet and an IO2 made of 360 views of the workshop. Two ideation sessions with two groups of designers were conducted to propose a scenario consisting of several risks to spot in the future application. Results show that the scenario was improved using the IO2, and final users and designers were more collaborative.

Mixed reality prototyping: a framework to characterise simultaneous physical/virtual prototyping

“…Several works have highlighted the importance of the viewing interface for design performance (Berni et al, 2023;Horvat et al, 2022;Nandy et al, 2023) noting differences when using XR compared to traditional modes. Benefits of XR implementation for design have been shown to be broad, including enhanced spatial reasoning (Horvat et al, 2022), divergence (Sopher et al, 2022), confidence and satisfaction with outcomes (Kim and Hyun, 2022), and collaboration (Bisson et al, 2023).…”

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