The Relation between Customer Types in a Real Supermarket Compared to a Virtual Supermarket

Virtual environments are becoming more popular for a variety of applications. One application we expect to see in the near future is virtual supermarkets. Although there is a lot of research in real supermarkets that gives us a better understanding of how people behave and what to expect of them as customers, there is little research, as yet, to compare whether that research is transferable to virtual supermarkets. This research compares whether known customer types in a real supermarket would transfer to a virtual supermarket. We conducted research in a CAVE (Cave Automatic Virtual Environment) through which participants (N=87) had the experience of shopping at a virtual supermarket, and we show that there is a significant overlap of customer types between the virtual and the real one.