Can virtual reality revolutionise market research?
Oculus Rift: anyone’s to buy for around $200 later this year.
As virtual reality technology finally heads for the consumer market, Lieberman Research Worldwide’s global CEO Dave Sackman says it’s more than just gamers that will benefit.
Last year Facebook purchased Oculus Rift for a reported $2 billion – before the product had even gone to market – signalling the excitement virtual reality headsets are generating. Yet beyond gaming, market research is also set for a technological overhaul – with virtual worlds helping researchers overcome many of the pitfalls of traditional, survey-based analysis.
“You can see, in a virtual reality experience, a near real-world,” Sackman says. “This solves a lot of problems with survey-based research.”
Sackman argues that by using virtual reality worlds in which consumers can interact with different package designs, price options, logos, shop layouts and so on, they can remain highly engaged – but more importantly, they can be tracked and analysed making “non-conscious” decisions.
It also, he says, solves the problem of high drop-out rates for traditional market research surveys by making the process highly engaging and fun.
“We can find better answers to questions that are hard for researchers to answer in traditional survey environments – those more impacted by the non-conscious,” Sackman says.
“We can collect new types of data – easily capturing gaze within a three-dimensional space, facilitating recall, recognition and attention analyses…and respondents find it more fun, so drop-out rates are very low.”
Somewhere between 75% and 95% of the decisions people make are deemed non-conscious – for instance people don’t rationally think ‘I’m going to cross my arms or pick up my phone’ – making virtual worlds in which any scenario is possible the perfect place to observe real consumer behaviour.
Lieberman Research Worldwide is now working in partnership with leading academics from Stanford and MIT in the US to seize the opportunity offered by virtual reality to make research – and researchers – better.
There is a wealth of academic evidence that has proven that by placing people in virtual environments deeper consumer insights can be observed. So much so, Sackman and others argue, that it’s even possible to alter behaviours.
The evidence suggests that virtual experiences can, just like real-world experiences, modify our neural pathways, our self-image, and our belief systems.
For example, participants who were “aged” in a virtual future proceeded to make more “mature” and deliberative choices about their present-day health and finances, whilst test subjects who were observed cutting down a virtual redwood tree became less likely to waste paper towels after the experience.
With Oculus Rift due to launch in consumer markets later this year with a price tag of around $200, the possibilities for researchers could be tantalising – but it’s still an expensive pursuit to build virtual worlds, filled with virtual products and test brands.
Sackman said it could easily cost over $100,000 to do it right, but argued that economies of scale – for instance building a virtual store that could test many different products and scenarios – mean the test world can be used over and over again.