Virtual Reality on Product Usability Testing: A Systematic Literature Review

Research has shown that virtual reality (VR) technology has significant relevance in the product development process, revealing the user’s increasing interactive capacity with the virtual product. This study aims to characterize the scientific knowledge that address the application of usability testing for product development in the automotive sector using virtual reality technology. Based on a systematic literature review (SLR) on virtual reality and product usability evaluations, it was conducted a search in Science Direct, Springer, IEEE Xplore, and Google Scholar knowledge bases, that identified six studies related to this topic. The results indicated that, although the user experience using virtual reality in usability testing has some limitations related to the tactile sense, its use is providing results capable of identifying design errors, bringing benefits in agile corrections, and cost reduction with physical prototypes. Additionally, user experience tends to be more realistic with the adoption of haptic devices. On this basis, virtual reality has the potential to innovate the product development process, which through usability testing, could verify and validate the human-machine interaction within the secure digital environment.