Using Immersive Virtual Reality to Create Presence in Online Shopping

Abstract

Recent attempts to apply virtual reality to e-commerce implies the need for a better understanding of this emerging immersive presentation medium as an approach for digitisation and marketing of product and brand. Compared with two-dimensional presentation media (e.g. text and images), virtual reality is much more capable of enabling “presence”, the perceptual illusion of nonmediation or the feeling of being in the virtual environment instead of in the real world. This explorative study will investigate what characteristics of immersive virtual reality artefacts and their associated virtual space to digitally stimulate “presence”, and whether and how “presence” can affect consumers’ online shopping behaviour. By adopting a phenomenological approach, the findings will help to sensemake relationships of presence in online shopping context among concrete virtual environment design options, presence, and other relevant constructs, through the analysis of data collected from semi-structured interviews of users of a virtual reality shopping app.