Enhancing VR Shopping With Dynamic Space Re-Arrangements: Towards Contextualized Information Displays and Improved Locomotion

Abstract Traditional VR shopping applications often rely on static designs for shopping spaces, necessitating frequent teleportation. However, an exploratory case study involving experienced online shoppers revealed several issues with this approach, including problems with interactivity, efficiency, motion sickness, and product presentation. To address these challenges, a workshop was organized with professional designers to gather design strategies, proposing the concept of the dynamic rearrangement of shopping space. This solution enables users to dynamically rearrange the shopping space and the products within it, utilizing space forms such as the department store, the shelf, and the room to suit various shopping intentions: exploration, product comparison, and product matching. In this way, users can obtain access to desired products by rearranging the shopping space rather than through excessive navigation in the static shopping space, creating a contextualized and efficient shopping experience. The solution was evaluated in a within-subjects comparison experiment, which demonstrated our solution’s significant improvements in involvement, motion sickness, efficiency in task performance, product perception, and overall user experience. Our findings suggest that treating the VR shopping space as a flexible, manipulable object through dynamic rearrangements and enriching it with contextualized design elements can provide users with an immersive and efficient VR shopping experience. Space rearrangements may also become a design reference for other VR application scenarios that require frequent locomotion events.