Usability Research Of An Immersive Virtual Assembly System

Existing virtual assembly systems lack sense of immersion and their interactions lack naturality.This paper built an immersive virtual assembly system(IVAS)based on natural gesture interaction with visual and auditory feedback,using HTC Vive helmet as the virtual assembly displayer,Leap Motion as the interactive device,Unity3 D as the virtual reality simulating platform and C# as the programing language.This paper chose the task completion(TC),the task completion degree(TCD),the task completion time(TCT),the mistaken degree(MD),and the user subjective satisfaction(USS)as usability indexes of the IVAS,and conducted the interaction feedback experiment and the training experiment.The interaction feedback experiment studied the usability of the IVAS under the four conditions of the neutral feedback,the visual feedback,the auditory feedback and the integrated feedback.The experiment outcomes showed that compared with the neutral and the auditory feedback,the visual feedback and the integrated feedback could significantly reduce the TCT,and the analysis of the USS also showed that the participants significantly preferred the visual feedback and the integrated feedback.In addition,the neutral feedback,the visual feedback,the auditory feedback and the integrated feedback had no significant difference in the TC,the TCD,and the MD.Finally,the human-machine interaction model of the IVAS was analyzed from five aspects of the articulatory distance,the functional distance,the expressive distance,the observational distance and the semantic distance,possible reasons behind the experiment results were discussed.To summarize,integrated feedback was concluded to be the optimal feedback condition.The training experiment contained the training effect experiment and the learning transfer effect experiment.The training effect and the learning transfer effect were compared between the IVAS with the integrated feedback and the realworld assembly environment(RAE).The experiment outcomes showed that the virtual assembly training could assist the realworld assembly.The training effect of the virtual assembly training was available,and there was no significant difference between that of the IVAS and the RAE.The learning transfer effect of the virtual assembly training was available,but that of the IVAS training was significantly worse than the RAE training.The training time of the IVAS was significantly higher than that of the RAE.In addition,for the TC,the TCD,and the MD,there was no significant difference between the training task and the testing task of the IVAS,the training task of the IVAS and the RAE,and the testing task of the IVAS and the RAE.Finally,the human-machine interaction model was analyzed.The research results of this paper can serve as useful guidelines for IVAE design and implementation.