With the recent advances in a computer technology, a virtual prototyping (VP) has been considered as a promising concept to meet various and difficult requirements for new product development. To realize the VP of digital products faithfully, it is very important to provide the people involved in product development with the realistic visualization and tangible interaction of the products, and the vivid simulation of user interface (UI) functional behaviors.
Especially, for the simulation of the UI functional behavior of a digital product in a 3D virtual environment, it is required to capture the functional behavior of the product, to represent it in some ways, and to utilize it with a finite state simulator in the virtual environment. In a conventional approach to a UI functional behavior simulation, UI designers use software tools for 2D UI design to generate the UI functional behavior of a digital product of interest. Due to lack of reusability of the UI functional behavior, VP developers need to analyze and integrate it into a VP system for its simulation in the 3D virtual environment. As this approach hinders the effective communication between the UI designers and the VP developers, it is very likely to create errors and thereby it takes significant time and effort, especially when it is required to represent the UI functional behavior to the finest level of detail.
In this thesis, in order to overcome the shortcomings of the conventional approach, we propose a new approach for reuse of UI functional behaviors of 3D virtual prototypes and their simulation in a 3D virtual environment. The approach adopts Simulink (developed by MathWorks) as a software tool to generate the UI functional behaviors of digital products, and facilitates a socket connection between Simulink and a target VP system, which plays a key role to reuse the UI functional behaviors easily and accurately for their simulation in the 3D virtual environment. Based on the approach, a VP system has been developed and applied for the design evaluation of various products. To show the usefulness of the proposed approach, we have conducted a case study about the design evaluation and obtained encouraging feedback from the users involved in the design evaluation. We highly expect that the proposed approach can greatly reduce time and effort required for developing the VP system, enhancing the process of product design and development.