Multimodal interaction with a household appliance based on haptic, audio and visualization

Virtual Prototypes (VPs) are currently substituting physical ones in some activities of the product development process, being more flexible, sharable and easy to modify. Several companies that currently make use of this practice have put effort in the improvement of visualization techniques and of the level of quality of the information that is visually represented, which is indeed very high. Actually, the level of realism that can be reached with VPs is constrained to vision, while other senses are generally under considered. Adding other senses, like touch and hearing, to the interaction with Virtual Prototypes has proved to be effective in augmenting the kind and realism of the information we can represent, and in addition allows us to simulate a grater number of phenomena. In the paper we describe a multimodal application based on visualization, sound and haptic technologies in which we have simulated the interaction with a household appliance. The paper presents the multimodal model that we have used to develop the application, and we discuss limits and potentialities of the use of the combination of the senses for interacting with the VP. The paper also presents the preliminary results of tests performed with end users.