The goal of the study was to evaluate the suitability of VP to
support HFE evaluation. A semi controlled between-group experiment
was employed in the study. Nineteen participants from a
company that offers minerals processing solutions and services
took part in the experiment. They were designers or other stakeholders
from a product lifecycle of the maintenance platform of a
rock crushing machine. They all deal with HFE issues such as performance
and well-being during the design process. The independent
variable was the type of a virtual prototype: AR prototype and
VE prototype. The two experiments will be called AR test/AR system
and VE test/VE system for the remainder of this paper.
Dependent variables measured in this experiment were the suitability
of the virtual prototype for the HFE evaluation, and the
overall assessment of the design object. In addition, subjective
workload was evaluated.