A virtual reality shopping experience using the apartment metaphor

Abstract

In contrast to conventional retail stores, online shopping comes with many advantages, like unrestricted opening hours and is more focused on functionality. However, these pros often come at a cost of complex search and limited product visualization. Virtual Reality (VR) has the potential to create novel shopping experiences that combine the advantages of e-commerce sites and conventional stores. In this work, we propose a VR shop concept where product placement is not organized in shelves but through spatial placement in appropriate locations in an apartment environment. We thus investigated how the spatial arrangement of products in a non-retail environment affects the user, and how the actual shopping task can be supported in VR. In order to answer these questions, we designed two product selection and manipulation techniques (grabbing and pointing) and two VR shopping cart concepts (a realistic basket and an abstract one) and evaluated them in a user study. The results indicate that product interaction using pointing in combination with the abstract cart concept performs best with regard to error rate, user experience and workload. Overall, the proposed apartment metaphor provides excellent customer satisfaction, as well as a particularly high level of immersion and user experience, and it opens up new possibilities for VR shopping experiences that go far beyond mimicking real shop environments in VR.