Abstract
In the virtual prototyping (VP) of digital products, it is important to provide the people involved in product development with the visualization and interaction of the products, and the simulation of their human machine interaction (HMI) behaviors in interactive 3D virtual environments. Especially, for the HMI behavior simulation, it is necessary to represent them properly and to play them back effectively according to user interaction in the virtual environments. In a conventional approach to HMI behavior simulation, user interface (UI) designers use UI design software tools to generate the HMI behavior of a digital product of interest. Due to lack of reusability of the HMI behavior, VP developers need to analyze and integrate it into a VP system for its simulation in a 3D virtual environment. As this approach hinders the effective communication between the UI designers and the VP developers, it is easy to create errors and thereby it takes significant time and effort especially when it is required to represent the HMI behavior to the finest level of detail. In order to overcome the shortcomings of the conventional approach, we propose an approach for representing the HMI behavior of a digital product using XML (eXtensible Markup Language) and for reusing it to perform the HMI behavior simulation in 3D virtual environments. Based on the approach, a VP system has been developed and applied for the design evaluation of various products. A case study about the design evaluation is given to show the usefulness of the proposed approach.