Assessing Telepresence, Social Presence and Stress Response in a Virtual Reality Store

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.