Shopping in Virtual Reality Stores: The Influence of Immersion on System Adoption

Abstract

Companies have the opportunity to better engage potential customers by presenting products to them in a highly immersive virtual reality (VR) shopping environment. However, a minimal amount is known about why and whether customers will adopt such fully immersive shopping environments. We therefore develop and experimentally validate a theoretical model, which explains how immersion affects adoption. The participants experienced the environment by using a head-mounted display (high immersion) or by viewing product models in 3D on a desktop (low immersion). We find that immersion does not affect the users’ intention to reuse the shopping environment, because two paths cancel each other out: Highly immersive shopping environments positively influence a hedonic path through telepresence, but surprisingly, they negatively influence a utilitarian path through product diagnosticity. We can explain this effect via low readability of product information in the VR environment and expect VR’s full potential to develop when the technology is further advanced. Our study contributes to literature on immersive systems and IS adoption research by introducing a research model for the adoption of VR shopping environments. A key practical implication of our study is that system designers need to pay special attention to the current state of technology when designing VR applications.

Key words and phrases:

• virtual reality
• laboratory experiments
• immersive retail
• IS adoption
• hedonic and utilitarian information systems
• consumer engagement

Supplemental Material

Supplemental material for this article can be accessed on the publisher’s website.

Notes

1 https://vive.com/us/product/vive-virtual-reality-system/

2 https://roadtovr.com/understanding-pixel-density-retinal-resolution-and-why-its-important-for-vr-and-ar-headsets/

3 Please see Table A1 in Appendix A for the system specifications and applied rendering parameters.

4 In addition, we refer to a video showing both environments as well as to a video comparing the high immersion (VR) shopping environment to the physical reality. Please see https://pub.uni-bielefeld.de/record/2934590

5 Scales used in the research model: Perceived telepresence (TEL) [54, 55, 64], perceived enjoyment (ENJ) [33, 56], perceived product diagnosticity (DIAG) [46], perceived usefulness (USE) [23, 56, 91], intention to reuse shopping environment (INT) [89, 92, 97].

6 Testing the model using Partial Least Squares SEM (PLS SEM) reveals qualitatively similar results.

7 Please note: Within this section, we focus on the most important findings. For the complete results, we refer to Table C2 and C3 in Appendix C. For an overview of the applied items, we refer to Table B2 in Appendix B.

8 Calculating the model with the standard ML estimation, leads to qualitatively similar results.

9 Robust fit indices based on Satorra-Bentler’s χ2.

Additional information

Funding

The authors thank the Nuremberg Institute for Market Decisions (formerly GfK Verein), founder and anchor shareholder of GfK SE, for funding this research.

Notes on contributors

Christian Peukert

Christian Peukert ([email protected]; corresponding author) is a Ph.D. candidate at the Institute of Information Systems and Marketing, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Germany. He received his Bachelor’s and Master’s degree in Industrial Engineering and Management from the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology. His research interests center on investigating consumer behavior within virtual reality applications as well as on experimental economics. His work has been presented at conferences such as  International Conference on Information Systems, European Conference on Information Systems, International Conference on Design Science Research in Information Systems, and others.

Jella Pfeiffer

Jella Pfeiffer ([email protected]) is Professor for Digitalization, E-Business and Operations Management at the Department of Economics and Business Studies, Justus Liebig University Giessen, Germany. Before, she worked as Post-Doc at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology and was manager of the Karlsruhe Decision & Design Lab. Her research focuses on decision support systems in e-commerce and her works on experimental design have been published in the Journal of the Association for Information Systems, Journal of Behavioral Decision Making, European Journal of Operational Research, and others.

Martin Meißner

Martin Meißner ([email protected]) is Associate Professor of Marketing and Innovation at the University of Southern Denmark. He received his Ph.D. in Business Administration (Marketing) from Bielefeld University, Germany. His research on visual attention, recommender systems, judgment and decision making and preference measurement has been published in the Journal of Marketing Research, Organizational Research Methods, Journal of Business Research, International Journal of Innovation Management, and others.

Thies Pfeiffer

Thies Pfeiffer ([email protected]) is a senior researcher at the Cluster of Excellence Cognitive Interaction Technology at Bielefeld University, where he is the technical director of the virtual reality lab. He holds a doctoral degree in informatics with a specialization in human-machine interaction. His research in that domain focuses on gaze and gesture, augmented and virtual reality, as well as immersive simulations for prototyping. He has organized several scientific events related to the topic of this paper, such as the GI Workshop on Virtual and Augmented Reality, the Workshops on Solutions for Automatic Gaze Analysis and several others. Currently, he is principal investigator in research projects on training in virtual reality, augmented reality-based assistance systems, and prototyping for augmented reality.

Christof Weinhardt

Christof Weinhardt ([email protected]) is director of the Institute for Information Systems and Marketing at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology. He is also a director and founder of the Karlsruhe Service Research Institute and director of the Research Center of Information Technology. He is Editor-in-Chief of the Journal Business & Information Systems Engineering. He received his Ph.D. in economics from the University of Karlsruhe. Dr. Weinhardt was a member of the expert group Business & Economics of the German National Research Foundation and has acted as expert adviser in the Enquete Commission of the German Parliament for Internet and Digital Society. With his academic background in industrial engineering, economics, and information systems, his research focuses on interdisciplinary topics related to market engineering with applications in IT services, energy, finance, and telecommunications markets. He has published more than 150 articles and books, and has received a number of awards for his research and teaching.