Abstract

Emotions play a significant role in the interaction between products and users. However, it is still not very well understood how users' emotions can be incorporated in product design [34]. We argue that this gap is due to a lack of a methodological and technological framework for investigating emotions' elicitation conditions and for emo-tion recognition. For example, the effectiveness of emotion elicitation conditions is generally validated by assessing users' emotional response through ineffective means (eg, surveys and interviews [36]). In this paper, we argue that Virtual Reality (VR) is the most suitable means to perform this investigation, and we propose a novel methodological framework, referred to as the Virtual-Reality-Based Emotion-Elicitation-and-Recognition loop (VEE-Loop), that can be exploited to realize it. The VEE-Loop consists of continuous monitoring of users' emotions, which are then provided to product designers as implicit user feedback. This information is used to dynamically change the content of VR envi-ronment, and the process is iterated until the desired affective state is solicited. In this work, we develop a proof-of-concept implementation of the VEE-Loop, and we apply it in two real use cases. Obtained results show that designers can precisely identify when users feel negative emo-tions (eg, frustration) simply by analyzing their movements. As negative emotions signal troublesome interactions with the virtual representation of their products, designers obtain valuable feedback on how to enhance them.

Date

March 21, 2022

Authors

Davide Andreoletti, Marco Paoliello, Luca Luceri, Tiziano Leidi

Journal

Information Technology for Management: Business and Social Issues: 16th Conference, ISM 2021, and FedCSIS-AIST 2021 Track, Held as Part of FedCSIS 2021, Virtual Event, September 2–5, 2021, Extended and Revised Selected Papers

Pages

42

Publisher

Springer Nature