A fuzzy MCDM approach to support customer-centric innovation in virtual reality (VR) metaverse headset design

Abstract

Nowadays, customer-centric innovation is important in affective design, leading to the design and development of a product that fits the needs of a group of target customers for sales and marketing. Though there is much research on customer-centric innovation and affective product design, designing a novel and innovative product that appeals to customers remains difficult. This is not only due to the difficulty of knowing a customer's preference, enabling the product functionality, etc., but it is also very complex to optimize both the technical and aesthetical design factors and parameters for a group of customers. The technical design specification is one of the critical aspects in designing innovative technological products. In fact, a similar group of target customers usually has hidden preferences that provide us with clues for identifying the design of a product. To this end, we propose a sophisticated optimization technique using the Hybrid Fuzzy-based Analytical Hierarchy Process and the Integral-based Taguchi Method called the Fuzzy multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) approach to determine the essential factors and design parameters in order to understand the preferences of customers and the technical requirements of engineers for designing the enclosure of a product. We demonstrate our methodology using the virtual reality (VR) Headset, which can be used for visualizing the metaverse in the virtual environment. The fuzzy MCDM approach suggested combines technical and aesthetical features to enhance the robustness of product design.