Anthropocentric approach in the design of Virtual Environments for SMEs

As part of the 3D-Child project, the Children Center of Excellence of Cholet wants to provide member companies (mostly small-to-medium size companies, or SME's) with a Virtual Reality tool to help them and evaluate their future products. This collaborative tool will allow for increased creativity within the teams, and reduced lead-time. This paper presents the advantages of an approach in designing Virtual Environments (VE) dedicated to new products and evaluation. First, a definition of anthropocentric design is provided. Then, an implementation methodology based on field observations of the system's future users is described. Finally, survey results of conscious needs assessed through focus groups and questionnaires are presented.