UX: human factors (III): ergonomics
Ergonomics in general
What will the digital experiences of the future look like, and how will you use them? What looks awesome on screen doesn’t always translate well to human experience.
Ergonomics play a crucial role when designing virtual reality experiences that demand for high endurance. Augmented and Virtual Reality manufacturing applications will have a significant impact the manufacturing sector in the years to come. The user needs to be able to hold on to specific tasks without getting overwhelmed and exhausted. The manufacturing industry has done quite some research in ergonomics VR, since it plays an important part in training programs. The focus in this research lies in enhancing data-driven, experiential training. Have a look at some cases and background information:
Human Ergonomics Evaluation
Posture Analysis
ErgoVR uses active exploration to measure ergonomics, process efficiency, or simply save user movements for later use as animations. An example below shows the use heatmaps.
article 1: Ergonomic Evaluation Of Virtual Assembly Tasks
The nature of the performed motions can provide a selection of body parts and respective degrees of freedom (DoF) that can be measured while testing a VR-experience:
• neck in flexion and extension • thigh (left and right) in abduction and adduction • thigh (left and right) in flexion and extension • leg (left and right) in flexion and extension • arm (left and right) in flexion and extension • arm ( left and right) in abduction and adduction • forearm (left and right) in flexion and extension • centre of prehension -wrist (left and right) in flexion and extension.
Carry analysis
Of course repetitive heavy duty can cause a lot of health issues amongst workers and so it is important to analyse the risk of fatigue and overload. For manufacturing, the VR-training can provide a good start for risk analysis of manufacturing tasks. A possible input for this analysis is: • The frequency of the carry task • The distance of carry • The population sample whilst the output is the maximum allowed load weight under these circumstances.
Headset ergonomics
Designers Prototype New Approaches to VR Headset Ergonomics and Input HMD Design, Ergonomics, And Comfort Test on HMD's (2016)
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