Design-by-the-Customer through Virtual Reality

The main goal of this work is to present some ideas for direct customers' participation in the design process in form of a pre-sale service, based both on the use of the Web VR and Immersive VR technologies. The Design-by-the-Customer concept coming from mass customization and product individualization practice and possibility for its implementation through recent Web and VR technologies are considered in details. A brief review of the existing developments in this field is presented. Further a prototype of an experimental VR product configurator, working in both web based and immersive virtual environments is described