• Archives of design research
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• v.18 no.3 s.61
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• pp.85-94
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• 2005

Most of product designers use 3D CAD system as a inevitable design tool nowadays and many new products are developed through a concurrent engineering process. However, it is very difficult for novice designers to get the sense of reality from modeling objects shown in the computer screens. Such a intangibility problem comes from the lack of haptic interactions and contextual information about the real space because designers tend to do 3D modeling works only in a virtual space of 3D CAD system. To address this problem, this research investigate the possibility of a interactive quantified structure simulation for product design using AR(augmented reality) which can register a 3D CAD modeling object on the real space. We built a quantified structure simulation system based on AR and conducted a series of experiments to measure how accurately human perceive and adjust the size of virtual objects under varied experimental conditions in the AR environment. The experiment participants adjusted a virtual cube to a reference real cube within 1.3% relative error(5.3% relative StDev). The results gave the strong evidence that the participants can perceive the size of a virtual object very accurately. Furthermore, we found that it is easier to perceive the size of a virtual object in the condition of presenting plenty of real reference objects than few reference objects, and using LCD panel than HMD. We tried to apply the simulation system to identify preference characteristics for the appearance design of a home-service robot as a case study which explores the potential application of the system. There were significant variances in participants' preferred characteristics about robot appearance and that was supposed to come from the lack of typicality of robot image. Then, several characteristic groups were segmented by duster analysis. On the other hand, it was interesting finding that participants have significantly different preference characteristics between robot with arm and armless robot and there was a very strong correlation between the height of robot and arm length as a human body.