Customer Emotion Capturing during Experiencing of Virtual Engineering Products in Virtual Reality

The reliable capturing of customer emotional feedback during the early phases of product development is becoming more important for the market success of future products. This paper presents a study which compares three different methods of emotion capturing in a Virtual Reality environment: closed questions, open questions and peripheral physiological measurements. We show that closed questions are too restricting and customers often give unrepeatable and arbitrary answers to them. Open questions give reliable feedback on the overall desired emotional effect of the product on customers in spite of the unlimited freedom of expression and difficult statistical interpretability, whereas peripheral physiological measurements enable reliable emotion capturing, provided that reliable emotional calibration has been performed