Summary: The VIRTUMER project, led by Dr. Nannan Xi, will address the current major question in today’s marketing – how mixed reality technology reshapes shopping experiences. Specifically, the project will research on how augmented reality (AR), virtual reality (VR) and augmented virtuality (AV) technologies lead to heightened consumer engagement and behaviour in the retail context. Based one the general objective of VIRTUMER project, we subdivide the research question into the following three types:

1.   What’s current situation and state of mixed reality technologies and its application in business? The results will be further employed in specifying the experiment design

2.   How the consumer engagement and behavior differs between types of mixed reality: virtual reality, augmented reality and augmented virtuality

3.  What attitudes, beliefs and demographic factors predict willingness of consumers to adopt VR, AR and AV shopping?

Contribution: Based on the extensive and highly rigorous experiment/based research, several journal papers can be published in some of the best journals in the marketing field (target venues such as Journal of Marketing, Journal of Interactive Marketing, Journal of Retailing). In addition, this dissemination of knowledge to the Finnish retail and marketing industry will have a large and synergic effect in Finnish marketing landscape that combines marketing with the strong Finnish ICT industry. As a result of the project, Finnish retail companies will be posses much higher technology readiness in implementing mixed  reality technologies to shopping context.