A narrative review of the impact of digital immersive technology on affective and sensory responses during product testing in digital eating contexts

Abstract

The environments and/or contexts typically used to determine consumer affective and sensory responses have been questioned for their ecological validity. However, conducting consumer testing in real-life scenarios is costly, logistically complex, and hard to standardise between participants due to a lack of control over external cues and product preparation. Immersive environments, representative of product consumption contexts, may provide more ecologically valid data. Recently, digital immersion technologies have been proposed to contextualise consumer studies whilst maintaining experimental control. This narrative review summarised published consumer studies including digital immersion in addition to traditional sensory booths and/or a real-life immersive contexts in their study design, to measure the impact of these contexts on liking, emotional response and intensity of sensory attributes. The findings suggest that emotional response ratings are more comparable to real-life, and that consumer engagement and reliability increases, when testing is conducted using digital immersive techniques compared to traditional sensory booths. Therefore, digital immersive techniques look promising to improve ecological validity of consumer testing, but further development and research is required.

Keywords: Consumer testing; Eating context; Emotional response; Engagement; Hedonic liking; Immersive technology; Sensory evaluation; Virtual reality.