Virtual Reality for Prototyping Personalization of an Autonomous Drive Context

Sammanfattning: The development of Autonomous Drive is escalating, but designing for User Experience in autonomous vehicles remains a challenge since there are no such vehicles out on the commercial market today. Designers are struggling to gain customer insights since the target customers never tried such a product. On the other hand, the main user group of Autonomous Drive in the future will most likely be people born between 1980 and 2000, and they are demanding a personalized experience from the technology they are using. It is therefore assumed that personalization will play an important role in the User Experience of the autonomous vehicles of tomorrow. This project aims for gaining customer insights about personalization in Autonomous Drive context today, by using prototyping in Virtual Reality to simulate personalized user scenarios. The user scenarios are based on ideas which are generated by engaging people into bodystorming sessions. The Design Sprint framework was used for design, implementation and test each scenario which resulted in very rapid prototyping. The hardware used for the prototype was HTC Vive in combination with Leap Motion, implementations in Virtual Reality was done in Unity and the virtual models are made with Blender. The experience of the Virtual Reality prototype was given positive input from target users, further it was concluded that the approach of using bodystorming for idea generation and then prototyping in Virtual Reality for evaluating the ideas was successful. To summarize, prototyping in Virtual Reality can be a valuable tool for User Experience in Autonomous Drive Industry.