VR-based Product Personalization Process for Smart Products

Through the synergies of advanced IT technologies in sensor network and hardware infrastructure, both industrial and consumer products are evolving rapidly to carry more smart features. To sharpen competitive edge in global market, manufacturers today ought to enable their customers to personalize their products to meet diversifying customer needs (CNs). However, the increasing complexity of smart product is dramatically expanding the design space due to over-loaded smart features, which results in significant challenges in the personalization of smart products. Typically, manufacturers operating in a configure-to-order (CTO) manner would adopt a mass customization strategy and implement it with a product configuration system (also known as product configurator). The user experience (UX) of personalizing products by conducting product configuration is crucial for encouraging customer retention and loyalty. This project studied the product personalization process for smart products by observing a group of customers conducting a series of product configuration tasks in several types of product configurators we developed for different platforms (web-based and Virtual Reality (VR) based version). By analyzing mental and physical reaction of the customer, a more systematic understanding of user preference has been attained. The proposed VR-based approach for realizing customer-centric product personalization has been proved to be valid and should be a valuable reference in the future development of the product configuration system.