Evaluating Forms of User Interaction with a Virtual Exhibition of Household Appliances

Abstract

A promising application area of virtual reality is the marketing of home appliances. A VR exhibition can combine the visual realism close to physical exhibition spaces with remote access, flexibility, interactivity, user-friendliness, and attractiveness, thus bringing advantages for both consumers and manufacturers. In this article, we present a VR system for interactive visualization of household appliances, which can support both individual sales and wholesale of products, allowing customers to visualize different versions of devices before making a purchase decision. The visualization of products takes place in a specially designed virtual kitchen so that the user can examine how the home appliances will present themselves in the context of a typical environment. However, an important open research question is to what extent this kind of interactive product presentation is appropriate for end-users not experienced in VR. In this paper, we describe an experiment aiming at evaluating different forms of users' interaction with a product exhibition in virtual reality. Popular controller-based and natural hand interactions are evaluated in the context of navigation and product operation.