Center for Service Innovation: Full-day seminar on VR and AR in services

On Thursday, March 16th, a very interesting seminar took place at SINTEF, Oslo on Virtual Reality (VR) and Augmented Reality (AR) in services.

CSI-affiliated researchers had the opportunity to present their work, as well as to engage in fruitful discussions about the future of AR and VR.

VR & AR RESEARCH @ SINTEF
Costas Boletsis from SINTEF presented the VR-related work that currently takes place at SINTEF (HCI group), describing and discussing the concept of Virtual Bodystorming and how VR can be utilized for role-playing in the service prototyping process.

VIRTUAL REALITY MARKETING FRAMEWORK
Linda Hollebeek from NHH and University of Auckland presented her current work on the Virtual Reality Marketing framework, triggering a discussion around the usefulness of such a framework and its future implications.

AFFECTIVE FORECASTING
Siv Skard from NHH introduced the participants to her work on affective forecasting, examining how exposure to immersive and non-immersive virtual environments affect behavioral intention and purchase for the travel industry.

At the end, a semi-structured workshop took place around the VR/AR topics that the present researchers thought as promising for further development and collaborations. The discussion was moderated by Amela Karahasanovic (SINTEF) and Costas Boletsis (SINTEF). Suggestions for future research and collaborations included: focusing on the empirical evaluation of current VR systems, conducting more conceptual work on the application of VR in marketing, service design, and HCI, as well as utilizing VR as an experimental method.

Source: The text and images are reposted from the related NHH blogpost.