Judy M. Vance
Virtual Reality Applications Center
Iowa State University
Ames, IA 50011-2160
Sergei Volkov
Virtual Reality Applications Center
NSF Design and Manufacturing Grantees Conference Proceedings, January 7-10, 2001, Tampa, Florida, CD-ROM.
Abstract
This award supports an investigation of the use of virtual reality in product design. This past year the focus of the work was on evaluating the effects that adding a haptic device to a virtual environment had on a person’s ability to make design decisions. A user study was performed with 76 participants. The results indicated that the group of users that used the haptic device came to decisions faster than the users who did not have the haptic device. However, the haptic device group did not make more accurate or more precise evaluations than the non-haptic group. Both groups made equally poor evaluations in terms of accuracy and precision. In addition, an overwhelming majority of the entire user population preferred to have the haptic device as part of the virtual environment when asked to make design decisions.
