Nowadays, co-design is progressively popular in the area of customized retail services. Co-design involves users and potential customers into the whole process of product design, from ideation to final design, and thus, has a great potential in offering a personalized customer experience based on the individual needs and behaviors. However, usually co-design requires face-to-face communication, which might be difficult especially in the current corona time. Additionally, it is a challenge for the customer, the non-expert designer to equally collaborate with professional designers. Therefore, a tool is needed to support remote co-design actions and expower the non-expert users for an equal cooperation with designers.

We propose that socialVR, an emerging mediated social interaction technology in the medium of Virtual Reality, has a potential in supporting remote and interactive co-design activities. Social VR technology enables users in different locations to interact with virtual avatars of other users in a collaborative Virtual Environment. Additionally, socialVR allows users to communicate with each other through diverse communication cues (i.e., 3d visual, audio, haptic), and hence, supports intricate social and physical interactions in co-design.

In this project, we aim to explore how socialVR can facilitate co-design, and understand how socialVR influences people’s experience and behavior in remote collaborative design tasks To find out the answers, we follow a research-through-design methodology. Firstly, we choose a specific use case of collaborative cake-making between cake-makers and clients for the purpose of customized retail. Then, based on the current interaction between baker and clients, we designed and developed a medium-fidelity VR prototype, which allows two users collaboratively design cakes in VE wearing head-mounted displays (HMDs). After that, we performed a VR test for user evaluation, so as to investigate the impacts of socialVR on social and collaborative behavior, as well as validate the functionality and interaction techniques of this prototype. The results offer abundant insights for us to understand the how design non-experts experience interacting with professional designers and design systems in socialVR, and how their experience influences their behavior.