Usability and performance of the leap motion controller and oculus rift for interior decoration

Abstract

At present common problems in interior design involve in many aspects such as customer's satisfaction not met, understanding mismatch between designers and customers since they are not on the same page. Therefore, we aim to develop a VR application for interior decoration in order to let customers decorate a virtual room according to their preferences and be able to share the image of their design to the designer and evaluate usability of the application. The principle of the application is to simulate the Virtual Reality (VR) via Oculus Rift CV1 cooperating a Leap Motion controller, a hand movement and gesture detection device which help users easily design, arrange, and move 3D objects (furniture) in the virtual environment. There are three main functionalities of the application. First, creating a floor plan to define an interior design area. Second, placing the furniture on the scene, which they cannot be overlapped. Third, user movement can be done by the virtual joystick controlled by hand movement. When the design is not complete, the user can save his/her work in XML format in order to work on the design later. Once the design is finished, the user can capture a bird's eye view of the work for better understanding between designers and customers. The performance evaluation of the application can be categorized into two groups: 1) Quantitative method: by assigning tasks to the tester users in order to evaluate the application in learnability aspect. 2) Qualitative method: using Bipolar Laddering (BLA), a participatory subjective exploration method on user experience, to find strengths and weaknesses of the application. The result of the evaluation shows that the average score of learnability is 4.58 out of 5.0 which means that the users would be able to create a floor plan and place furniture as they wish easily on the scene. The application gives the users more realistic view, and the design output can be used in the real world. © 2018 IEEE.