Comparison of immersive room and virtual reality, through the consumption episode "Eating a sandwich in a park"

Webinaire ; Eurosense meeting tutorial.

International audience

英语. Conventional approaches for consumers’ tests, CLT and HUT, lead respectively to a high either internal or external validity. In recent years, several immersive approaches have been developed to achieve both internal and external validity at the same time, i.e. environments close to actual consumption context while keeping parameters under control. Virtual reality (VR) is one of the most promising one.In this study, we assess two immersive strategies in terms of internal and external validity for a consumption episode “having a sandwich for lunch in a park”. The two experimental conditions were an immersive room (N = 57, Fig. 1) and a VR environment (N = 55, Fig. 2). We add two control conditions: an actual park in summer (N = 56, Fig. 3) vs. sensory booths (N = 59, Fig. 4). For each condition, 4 sandwich recipes were assessed in between participants design. As one of the recipes was duplicated (for reliability assessment), participants were provided with 5 samples presented in a sequential monadic order. The samples were assessed on several hedonic criteria: liking, product-context appropriateness, and emotional responses. Participants ended the experience with a questionnaire measuring their level of immersion. We hypothesized that (1) immersive room and virtual reality would reach a higher internal validity than the actual park environment, and (2) the two immersive approaches would reach a higher external validity than the CLT condition.As expected, immersive conditions showed good external validity, where participants were more immersed and engaged than in sensory booths. However, for internal validity criteria, such as discrimination, both immersive conditions obtained lower results than actual park condition. This difference of internal validity could be linked to a novelty effect, that would have distracted participants from the product assessment task.