Emotion Tracking in Virtual Reality Fashion Shows

Virtual Reality (VR) technologies are increasingly being adopted in fashion marketing to create innovative new channels for sales, advertising, brand communication, and strengthening relationships with consumers. In addition, virtual technologies can be useful for personalizing the offer, gathering insights, and user engagement. However, there seem to be few occurrences where the potential of virtual technologies on User eXperience (UX) and engagement is explored, evaluating the advantages compared to real-life experiences. Analyzing these aspects for virtual fashion experiences can be challenging. For measuring the UX, quantitative methods such as sensors capable of recording and examining the body's responses and automatic systems used to recognize emotions by tracking facial movements and expressions have been increasingly employed. In the context of fashion marketing, they can help analyze the implications that virtual experiences have, also considering content personalization and company promotion. This paper presents the design and development of a VR application that includes emotion-tracking technology that can be used to evaluate users' emotional reactions to virtual experiences and compare them with real ones. The final aim of the study is to increase the degree of user engagement and the quality of the virtual fashion show UX of the Italian clothing brand Bacon. Preliminary test sessions were organized to evaluate users' emotional reactions to the virtual experience and verify their effectiveness in relation to the objectives of the study.