A virtual reality grocery shopping game to improve awareness for healthy foods in young adults

The current situation of obesity in children and adults is indicative of the inability to choose the right product from a typical collection of various similar products in the supermarket. To obtain a more quantitative idea regarding their shopping patterns, we have developed a prototype of a game which offers a virtual shopping experience to the player by letting him move around and shop in a virtual reality grocery store environment. The idea behind developing the game instead of a questionnaire was (1) to provide a more engaging and realistic experience, (2) to enable educators to conveniently collect the player’s choices, and to tune the difficulty of the experience in real time via levelling. The game was played by 30 different people between the age group of 17 to 29 where, each of the players was made to play the game twice. In the first run, the players chose products they desire based on their knowledge and intuitions. Just before the game ended, the player was taught about the choices he had made and better products were recommended. This was achieved with the help of specially designed user friendly labels with color codes for better and faster understanding. The second run is crucial for analyzing if the player has actually benefited from this review section of the game. After the analysis, the ANOVA test on the scores obtained by the players reveal that they have indeed learnt to shop better from the game.