This article provides a novel functionalist account of embodiment in immersive virtual environments, grounded in a formal model of cognition, supported by past empirical evidence, and offering a testable framework for predicting when virtual experiences will produce cognitive and emotional effects. Our approach complements existing work on telepresence and subjective experience by applying the Thin Model as an intermediate theory linking interface affordances to perception, emotion, and behavior. Drawing on previously published immersive virtual reality studies, we show that when key functional elements - such as sensing, recognition, inspection, and feedback - are preserved, behavioral and emotional outcomes remain stable even when locomotion mechanisms differ. These findings support a criterion of functional sufficiency for embodiment where interface substitution leaves core policies of action unchanged. We outline a set of theory-driven tests to identify the limits of this invariance and argue that embodiment should be defined by the integrity of the perception-action loop, not by anatomical mimicry.

With the rising popularity of immersive virtual reality (iVR) technologies, retailers are increasingly seeking innovative ways to create unique digital shopping experiences for their consumers. However, existing literature lacks a unified and comprehensive review that examines the interplay between virtual stimuli and consumer behavior in iVR shopping environments. To fill this gap, we conducted a systematic literature review, employing the Stimulus-Organisms-Responses (S-O-R) model as the underlying theoretical framework. This review analyzed empirical research on consumer behavior in iVR retail environments by focusing on experimental studies. Following the thematic analysis, we categorized the outcomes into descriptive themes to better comprehend consumer behavior within each theme. Our findings provide valuable insights for retailers and marketers aiming to enhance the consumer shopping experience using iVR technologies and suggest directions for future research.

The rapid increase in population and unsustainable agricultural practices has significantly damaged the environment. Our study explores how to achieve food security through environmentally friendly methods such as controlled environment agriculture (CEA), genetic editing (GE), and farming automation (FA), with an emphasis on the importance of consumer acceptance of these technologies. Analyzing data from 2138 Australians and 1760 New Zealanders, we employ a two-step clustering method—(1) hierarchical clustering and (2) k-means clustering—to categorize consumers on the basis of their demographic and lifestyle preferences into three segments that capture differences in attitudes toward new agricultural technologies: “Green Urbanites,” “Environmentally Unconcerned,” and “Skeptical Foodie.” Our findings reveal that Green Urbanites are the most open to adopting CEA, GE, and FA, while Skeptical Foodies and Environmentally Unconcerned are more reluctant. We contribute to theory by studying a novel facet of consumer acceptance of sustainable technologies and revealing how consumption, living, and lifestyle patterns motivate new technology acceptance in the agricultural sector. To inform practice, we suggest tailored strategies to increase engagement of the identified segments and promote wider acceptance of sustainable agricultural practices for enhanced food security.

Consumers tend to perceive sustainable consumption as a complex and difficult to understand phenomenon. This particularly applies when being confronted with different forms of sustainable consumption. Therefore, we explore individual and joint facilitators and inhibitors of different forms of sustainable consumption, i.e., green buying, local buying, and environmental saving. Our online surveys conducted with consumers from Australia (n = 3561) and New Zealand (n = 2597) demonstrate that strong environmental attitudes increase green buying, local buying, and environmental savings, albeit to varying extents. Consumers' perceived financial ability is negatively associated with environmental savings and positively with the other forms. Additionally, environmental savings are negatively related to green buying. We identify further managerially relevant facilitators and inhibitors of sustainable consumption. Thus, we contribute to the literature by considering diverse forms of sustainable consumption and their tensions, and exploring the interplay of consumers’ environmental attitudes and perceived (rather than actual) financial ability.

This study explores the development of a comprehensive customer journey framework within the context of immersive virtual reality (iVR) shopping environments. The research question focuses on recommending an effective customer journey that encompasses various touchpoints and purchase phases in iVR retail. A thorough literature review was conducted to identify existing touchpoints in the literature and to recognize additional touchpoints relevant to physical and online retail contexts. The findings led to the formulation of a novel customer journey framework specifically tailored for iVR shopping experiences. The framework emphasizes the integration of diverse touchpoints and purchase phases, enabling retail businesses to enhance customer experiences (CX) and make informed decisions. The practical implications of the customer journey framework lie in its ability to guide retail businesses in optimizing the customer experience in iVR environments. Furthermore, the study contributes to the theoretical discourse surrounding human-computer interaction and customer-centric design. By embracing this customer journey framework, businesses and researchers can collaborate to drive innovation and create more immersive and engaging iVR retail experiences. Overall, this study provides valuable insights and guidance for designing a comprehensive customer journey in the emerging domain of iVR shopping.

Immersive Virtual Reality (iVR) is rapidly altering the world we live in. Studies have shown that people exhibit similar behaviours and reactions in virtual retail scenarios, thus making iVR a promising tool for researchers to study in-store shopper behaviour. This paper investigates whether virtual avatars can affect users' perceived telepresence and shopping behavior. We recruited 54 participants to experience the virtual store and our findings showed the mere presence of virtual avatars in the store had no significant effect on participants' sense of telepresence and shopping behaviour. We believe this research highlighted the need for further study and contributed to the development of fully-fledged virtual simulated shopping experiences.

PurposeThis research explores anticipated long-term change in the retail and services marketplace, directly arising as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic.Design/methodology/approachA series of 20 in-depth interviews were conducted with retail and service stakeholders (executives, suppliers and thought-leaders) from across Asia-Pacific (New Zealand and Australia), the United Kingdom, Europe and the United States.FindingsWe identify six guiding principles for long-term change in the retail and services sector required to guide future business development and practice, including embedding new ways of working, rethinking the role and purpose of physical space, prioritizing digital elements, integrating employees in community, building agile supply and planning for future turbulence.Originality/valueThe Covid-19 pandemic is different from prior disruptive experiences in that it was a sudden shock to business and was collectively experienced by firms, workers and consumers across the globe. This research provides a view of decision-makers’ sensemaking and anticipated changes impacting the future retail and services marketplace.

Understanding the behaviour of customers and creating a meaningful and positive customer experience is essential for retail businesses to gain sustainable competitive advantage. While immersive virtual reality (iVR) technologies provide new ways for businesses to sell their products or services online, little is known about how customers interact in these simulated environments and the factors that influence their behaviour. However, it is unclear precisely what types of similarities and differences will exist between the customer behaviours shown in this new iVR shopping experience and those in brick-and-mortar stores and e-commerce. It's crucial for businesses to comprehend which shopping channels are ideal for providing their clients with enhanced shopping experiences. In order to give a thorough evaluation of the impacts of shopping experiences across various channels on consumer behaviour and variables that affect customer experience, the research performed a literature review.

Immersive Virtual Reality (VR) has positioned itself as an extension of the world that we live in. VR applications have provided us with amplified and interactive environments that can simulate current real-world scenarios. This study examines prior literature on the study of shoppers' behavior across different VR simulated retail contexts to provide an overall view of the status of VR stores. The study shows that while VR offers many benefits in real world scenarios, there exists limited evidence that informs on questions pertaining to the external validity. That is, how can VR interactions be generalized to accurately represent shopper behaviors in this type of research setting. Therefore, there is a need to understand the application of VR tools in a holistic manner while conducting research studies that examine shopper behaviors. In this paper, we have explored VR marketing applications, which explicitly make comparisons between virtual simulated retail environments and their physical benchmark in food retail stores. Findings reveal that while VR experiments are still very much research in progress, they offer much potential in understanding shopper perceptions and shopping behaviors. This paper has provided rich insights on the current state-of-the-art research in virtual simulated retail environments and offers more directions for advancing this promising domain of research.

The development of immersive Virtual Reality (VR) has provided users around the globe with a highly realistic virtual world experience. Since its first use, extensive research has been conducted with the attempt to understand how human behaviour in virtual environments compares to the real world. Studies have shown that people exhibit similar behaviours and reactions in a number of scenarios including virtual shopping, thus making it a promising tool for researchers to study in-store shopper behaviour. This paper outlines ideas on how store atmospherics can affect the user experience, stress levels and behaviour in a virtual store environment, developed using the Unreal Game Engine. The presence/absence of avatars can be investigated as an important aspect of store atmospherics and a potential antecedent of perceived presence in a simulated retail environment. These insights will be useful for retailers in that they can guide development and improvement of virtual simulated shopping experiences, using elements of telepresence and social presence, to enhance the consumer shopping experience and their own retail strategy.

The increasing availability of immersive Virtual Reality (VR) hardware in private households has opened up significant opportunities for innovations in online retailing. Online retailers can develop realistic, albeit simulated, three-dimensional retail environments that use immersive elements to create a more exciting online shopping experience. Nevertheless, to date, very little is known about how observed shopper behaviour in immersive VR store environments compares to existing knowledge in the physical or other online retail research literature. To that end, this paper focuses on human personality traits and whether these translate to familiar observations of in-store shopper behaviour. Specifically, the research examined the ‘Big Five’ personality traits – agreeableness, conscientiousness, extraversion, neuroticism, and openness to experience, and their impact on purchase behaviours such as product inspection time, proportion of private label purchases, and impulsive buying. It is further investigated how the purchase behaviours impact the outcomes of the shopping trip. The results revealed a variety of expected relationships between purchase metrics and the outcomes of the shopping trip; however, in stark contrast to the findings of extant studies, shopper personality did not show any impacts on the investigated purchase behaviours. Further research is needed to determine whether this failure to replicate past studies of shopper personality was, in fact, due to differences in the store environment or rather due to the moving from survey-based method of shopper data collection to naturalistic observation. Nonetheless, this finding has important implications for e-retailing strategies and market research practices.

Immersive virtual reality shopping environments may use a variety of locomotion techniques. Currently the most prominent are instant teleportation and motion-tracked walking. Motion-tracked walking more closely mimics natural shopping behaviour as it allows a shopper to physically walk through the virtual store; however, it requires a larger space and has design and cost implications. Instant teleportation is likely to be cheaper and to enable larger store formats; yet it is unknown whether the choice of instant teleportation results in different in-store behaviour by shoppers. Our research examines whether instant teleportation provides a feasible design alternative to motion-tracked walking by determining whether it does result in altered shopper behaviour. Using a split sample experiment in a purpose-built immersive VR convenience store, we compare shoppers' emotional states (engagement, excitement and stress, measured through electroencephalography), purchase behaviour metrics, and store coverage (represented by heat maps) between motion-tracked walking and instant teleportation locomotion techniques. Results demonstrate that the absence of physical walking had no impact on emotional states or the investigated shopping outcomes. While instant teleportation led to some skipped shelf sections, there was no impact observed on the number of unplanned purchases. To the extent that the naturalism of immersive VR relies on proprioceptive engagement or embodied cognition, this appears to be adequately supported by upper body movements that do not require physical walking. These findings provide fresh insights for the design of Virtual Reality shopping environments for market research or future online-retailing platforms.

Shopper research has long been undertaken with physical simulated stores and desktop-operated virtual stores. However, recent developments in motion-tracked virtual reality offer a range of new possibilities for research using immersive walk-around virtual simulated stores. To date, there is little knowledge published on the authenticity of shopper behaviour in such immersive virtual environments. The present study therefore reports exploratory results from 153 multicategory shopping trips conducted in an immersive virtual convenience store. Observed shopper metrics and theoretical effects are compared with equivalent data obtained from published sources and found to be consistent across all measures. Specifically, shoppers purchase a plausible share of private label brands, more private label brands in lower consumption pleasure product categories, more products from higher compared with lower shelf positions, make a plausible proportion of impulsive purchases, and spend less time inspecting familiar versus unfamiliar brands. Further, time in-store, total spending, and product handling time are higher for women than for men. These exploratory findings show that participants continue to exhibit realistic shopper behaviours in an immersive virtual simulated store. Such stores are therefore a cost-effective alternative to other methods for measuring consumer behaviour. They offer significant potential for innovative experimental designs in consumer research, as well as potential for future use as a digital shopping channel.

This study explores whether using immersive virtual reality technology (iVR) in a virtual simulated store (VSS) enhances perceived telepresence and usability compared to conventional desktop technology. Two experiments were carried out in a between-groups methodological design that involved a total of 111 participants who completed a simulated shopping trip. In the first experiment a conventional desktop computer setup was used to create the VSS using mouse and keyboard for navigation. The second experiment used iVR1 technology including a head-mounted display, body-tracking sensors, and hand-held motion-tracked controllers, which enabled navigation via body movement in a walk-around iVR environment. Participants purchased grocery items within each VSS2 environment, and post-hoc measures of perceived telepresence and usability ratings were compared. Results showed that participants in the iVR group experienced stronger feelings of immersion and perceived naturalness of interactions with the store environment compared to the desktop group. Both factors potentially lead to enhanced perceived telepresence. However, the visual realism of virtual products and the grasping interface for iVR control of product inspection could be further enhanced by advances in iVR technology. This study has implications for food marketing research as the use of immersive iVR can potentially lead to more naturalistic shopping behaviour in VSSs.