Exploiting Virtual Reality for Enhancing the Shopping Experience in the Fashion Industry: Between Interaction and Perception

Nowadays, buying a product online is no longer about the product itself but the experience it offers. The planned thesis work aims to understand how to improve the user's shopping experience in the context of online shopping for the fashion industry. To enhance the shopping experience, retailers need to sell new services by leveraging technologies such as Virtual Reality (VR). The first part of the research investigates which shopping experience, between one developed for a desktop computer - Desktop Virtual Reality (DVR) - and one developed in Virtual Reality (VR), generates better results in terms of hedonic and utilitarian values, cognitive load, and user experience. Also, the lack of touch in online shopping is a crucial issue. The second part of the research concerns the implementation of pseudo-haptics feedback within the online shopping experience with VR. Pseudo-haptics can induce haptic sensations without requiring actual touch through the influence of other sensory modalities, such as vision. To this end, we aim to explore the feasibility of recreating the sensation of people's actual touch with fashion products and fabrics through a “visualized touch” on an interface.