Touching the Untouchable: Exploring Multi-Sensory Augmented Reality in the Context of Online Retailing

Abstract

People interested in the research are advised to contact the author for the final version of the publication, or visit the DOI to the publisher's website. • The final author version and the galley proof are versions of the publication after peer review. • The final published version features the final layout of the paper including the volume, issue and page numbers. Link to publication General rights Copyright and moral rights for the publications made accessible in the public portal are retained by the authors and/or other copyright owners and it is a condition of accessing publications that users recognise and abide by the legal requirements associated with these rights. • Users may download and print one copy of any publication from the public portal for the purpose of private study or research. • You may not further distribute the material or use it for any profit-making activity or commercial gain • You may freely distribute the URL identifying the publication in the public portal. If the publication is distributed under the terms of Article 25fa of the Dutch Copyright Act, indicated by the "Taverne" license above, please follow below link for the End User Agreement:

Tangible Service Automation: Decomposing the Technology-Enabled Engagement Process (TEEP) for Augmented Reality

“…Previous research shows that information fit-to-task not only improves customers’ abilities to assess digital service quality (Xu, Benbasat, and Cenfetelli 2013) but also increases service providers’ credibility (Gupta, Yadav, and Varadarajan 2009). In an AR service automation context, information fit-to-task is reflected in how well the AR automated service elements are embedded into the physical service environment, how they respond to changes in that environment in a service-relevant manner, and how they allow for natural forms of service-related interaction (Heller et al 2019b; Hilken et al 2017). AR technology features different modalities (e.g., text, image, video), allows for different forms of interactivity (Javornik 2016), and integrates into a customer’s physical environment in various ways (Scholz and Smith 2016).…”

“…Although recent literature acknowledges AR's impact on buying intentions and sales (Heller et al 2019a(Heller et al , 2019bHilken et al 2017), it has not closed the gap between engagement literature and AR service automation. Furthermore, it has largely overlooked how AR can enable service automation without sacrificing tangible aspects of services.…”

“…When customers interact with these features, they perceive the digital content as "real" (Hilken et al 2017) and experience increased mental perceptions of the tangibility of service offerings (Heller et al 2019a). This sensibility has positive effects on relevant service outcomes, including customers' perceived effectiveness and enjoyment of service experiences (Hilken et al 2017), decision comfort (Heller et al 2019a(Heller et al , 2019b, and overall satisfaction (Poushneh and Vasquez-Parraga 2017). Thus, for firms that pursue service automation, AR offers the ability to deliver on the service imperative of saving customers time and money across the service cycle (Berry 2016) while maintaining the tangibility that customers value (Panda and Das 2014).…”

Shitsukan — the Multisensory Perception of Quality

“…The last few years have seen a rapidly expanding interest in the area of augmented retail, as for, example, in the case of online clothing/shopping applications (e.g., de Vries et al, 2018;Flavian et al, 2019;Heller et al, 2019;Xiao et al, 2016). There is also growing interest in the design of material/object interaction sounds, in everything from push-buttons (Mortensen et al, 2009) to sporting equipment (Roberts et al, 2005; see Stanton and Spence, 2020, for a review).…”

“…There are currently a number of intriguing possibilities as far as augmented retail applications are concerned, where stimulating more than just the consumer's eyes holds the promise of increasingly engaging multisensory applications (e.g., see Heller et al, 2019;Leswing, 2016;Overmars and Poels, 2015;Xiao et al, 2016; see Petit et al, 2019, for a review). To be absolutely clear, the primary audience for this particular review is those working (or interested) in applied multisensory domains, including those considering how best to render material perception, as well as the rapidly-emerging field of multisensory packaging design (see Velasco and Spence, 2019, for reviews).…”