What's Mine Is a Hologram? How Shared Augmented Reality Augments Psychological Ownership

Abstract

Augmented Reality (AR) holograms are 3D digital objects projected into a customer's physical environment through mobile technology. Applied as potential substitutes to physical products, AR holograms pose a unique challenge for conventional configurations of product ownership. Taking a socially situated cognition perspective, we demonstrate how customers' shared experience of AR holograms leads to distinct perspectives on psychological ownership. In Study 1, we demonstrate how customisation of AR holograms lets customers feel psychological ownership of digital products. In Study 2, we highlight the mechanisms of social adaptation related to assimilation and differentiation that drive the relationship between customisation and psychological ownership of AR holograms in social settings. In Study 3, we illustrate how these mechanisms are influenced by the affordances of AR technology when customers switch between personal or shared devices. We discuss implications for theory and marketing practice of this potentially novel class of digital consumer products.

Access-Based Services as Substitutes for Material Possessions: The Role of Psychological Ownership

“…Sinclair and Tinson (2017) and Danckwerts and Kenning (2019) identify psychological ownership in consumers' experiences of music streaming; Karahanna et al's (2015) study also reveals that psychological ownership needs motivate social media consumption. Consumers also refer to their meaningful relationships with virtual consumer goods, such as in-game avatars (Watkins, Denegri-Knott, and Molesworth 2016) or holograms (Carrozzi et al 2019). Overall, psychological ownership has been cited as a critical factor for service research (Van Doorn et al 2017).…”

“…As previous research has shown, communal consumption relationships create value because they make an individual customer feel like part of a like-minded group (e.g., Algesheimer, Dholakia, and Herrmann 2005; Schau, Muñiz, and Arnould 2009; Wirtz et al 2013). If an ABS fosters feelings of communal identification among customers (Carrozzi et al 2019; Schaefers, Lawson, and Kukar-Kinney 2016) and makes them aware of and sympathetic with other users of the service, it should elicit a feeling of being embedded in a home-like environment. We argue: Hypothesis 3: Communal identification among customers of an ABS is positively associated with psychological ownership toward this ABS. …”

“…Prior research suggests that the importance consumers assign to owning material objects constitutes a critical barrier to ABS use (Kahneman, Knetsch, and Thaler 1990; Richins 2004; Weiss and Johar 2013); the importance of material possessions for consumers relates negatively to their use of ABS (Bardhi and Eckhardt 2012; Belk 2014). However, feelings of perceived ownership can emerge toward a range of material and immaterial objects such as cars, music streaming, and even augmented reality holograms (Carrozzi et al 2019; Danckwerts and Kenning 2019; Pierce, Kostova, and Dirks 2003). We thus leverage symbolic self-completion theory (Wicklund and Gollwitzer 1982) to propose that psychological ownership of ABS might satisfy consumers’ need for ownership and substitute for material ownership.…”

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

“…Most mobile phone AR applications nowadays allow for control via swiping and pinching fingers using touch screens, while voice-based control for holograms and other interactive content is on the rise (Stambor 2017;Cowan et al 2017). Cutting-edge technologies like Microsoft's HoloLens expand the range of sensory controls to include hand gestures, voice commands and gaze control (Kalantari and Rauschnabel 2018;Taylor 2016;Carrozzi et al 2019). Based on the premise that multi-sensory interaction affects mental representation of experiential product use (Merel 2019), there is a pressing need for retailers to develop an indepth understanding of m-AR and explore its role in alleviating the challenges of mental intangibility.…”

Extended Reality for the Clinical, Affective, and Social Neurosciences

“…Unfortunately, many social neuroscience approaches presented static and controlled stimuli to participant who must believe, imagine, and act "as if"' they could modify the course of a social interaction. As a result, some current social neuroscience approaches would benefit from adding real-time dynamic and adaptive XR platforms that include augmented reality [118,119], virtual environments [120,121], and virtual human agents with complex cognitive architectures [122].…”