The Virtual Emotion Loop: Towards Emotion-Driven Product Design via Virtual Reality

Abstract

Emotions play a significant role in product design for end-users. However, how to take emotions into account is not yet completely understood. We argue that this gap is due to a lack of methodological and technological frameworks for effective investigation of the elicitation conditions related to emotions and corresponding emotional responses of the users. Emotion-driven design should encompass a thorough assessment of users' emotional reactions in relation to certain elicitation conditions. By using Virtual Reality (VR) as mean to perform this investigation, we propose a novel methodological framework, referred to as the VR-Based Emotion-Elicitation-and-Recognition loop (VEE-loop), to close this gap.