Augmented Reality in Interactive Marketing: The State-Of-The-Art and Emerging Trends

Recent years have seen a swift embracement of augmented reality (AR) as an interactive marketing tool, which has been accelerated even more rapidly by the COVID-19 pandemic. However, the general attitude toward the technology as well as the factors that inhibit or facilitate its adoption from both, the consumers, and practitioners, remain elusive. This prevents marketers from fully exploiting the potential related to AR marketing. This chapter (1) draws on current literature to conceptualize consumer experience in AR marketing and (2) complements these findings with a practitioner perspective by conducting interviews with small retailers. The results of the present chapter indicate that, from the consumer perspective, AR can give rise to diverse cognitive, affective, and social-psychological outcomes, which can translate into behavioral outcomes, including purchase intentions, word-of-mouth intentions, and brand engagement. From the practitioner's perspective, initial interview results reveal that advancements toward an easy integration of AR within existing IT infrastructures, as well as efficient ways to create virtual product replicas are crucial for the adoption of AR by small retailers. Based on the combined observations from literature and the conducted interviews, a comprehensive framework of interactive AR marketing is provided, and a way forward is discussed by addressing the emergent trends of AR as an interactive marketing technology. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023.

Game-Based Approaches to Enhancing Public Understanding of Science: A Descriptive Literature Review

With prominent looming global issues such as climate change and COVID-19, public understanding of science (PUS) is increasingly perceived to be vital for humanity to address and adapt to global wicked challenges. Compared to conventional approaches that struggle with public engagement, games can potentially remedy this by proactively engaging players towards more fruitful performance in and outside games. While the employment of game-based approaches in pedagogy in general is not a new development, gamifying PUS has only recently grown to relative prominence for its superiority in engaging the public with active science-derived interpretation, deliberation, and consequent action. To understand the state-of-the-art of this field, we conduct a systematic descriptive literature review of the extant corpus. We reviewed 29 papers and investigated their types of interventions, contexts, populations, and outcomes. The results overall indicate diverse yet imbalanced research focuses thus far, for which we discuss implications for future research. © 2023 IEEE Computer Society. All rights reserved.

Gamification and policy compliance: Results from an online vignette experiment in the context of social distancing for public health security

The commonly applied strategies for promoting compliance with public health and safety policies can be inefficient and coercive, posing a need to examine novel motivational strategies to aid in this endeavor. Gamification, which aims to foster engagement and intrinsic motivation towards mundane activities and behaviors, is one of the vanguard design approaches among behavioral change support systems. Despite the increasing interest in gamification, the corpus lacks studies on its effects on policy compliance. Therefore, this study examines the relationships between gamification design types, gameful experience, and policy compliance in the social distancing context (during COVID-19) using a vignette-based online experiment (n=937). Based on the results, gameful experience mediates the positive relationships between achievement and progression-based, competitive, and immersive gamification and policy compliance, while social gamification is not associated with gameful experience. The results provide evidence of gamification's potential as a non-coercive method of helping people follow policies. © 2023 IEEE Computer Society. All rights reserved.

The Relationship Between Students' Flow Experience and Their Behavior Data in Gamified Educational Systems

The number of students using online educational systems is increasing, especially after the growth of the use of this type of system due to the social isolation caused by the Covid-19 pandemic. This situation highlighted the challenge of analyzing the users' experience in this type of system, especially when evaluating more complex experiences, such as the flow experience. One of the most promising innovative alternatives is to use the behavior data logs produced by students in educational systems to analyze their experiences. In this paper, we conducted a study (N = 24) to analyze the relationships between the behavior data logs produced by students when using a gamified educational system and their flow experience during the system usage. Our results contribute to the automatic users' experience analysis in educational systems. © 2022 IEEE Computer Society. All rights reserved.

Using augmented reality for shopping: a framework for AR induced consumer behavior, literature review and future agenda

Purpose: A current technological trend, which has gained even more traction recently due to the COVID-19 pandemic, is the use of augmented reality (AR) in shopping environments. AR is addressing contemporary challenges rooted in online shopping (e.g. in terms of experientiality and try-on) and is fundamentally reshaping consumers' experiences. The purpose of this study is to provide a synthesized and structured overview of the state-of-the-art research focused on AR shopping. Design/methodology/approach: The authors conduct a systematic literature review of the empirical academic corpus focused on shopping via AR technology. Findings: The review reveals the diverse psychological (cognitive, affective, and social) as well as behavioral outcomes related to the use of AR in the shopping context. The authors integrate the results into a framework for AR induced consumer behavior in shopping, thereby providing an important overview of the dynamics in AR-related shopping and the factors influencing the adoption of the technology by consumers. Specifically, the authors encountered that the technological abilities of AR (e.g. in terms of interactivity, vividness, informativeness, etc.) are a source for enhanced utilitarian and hedonic shopping experiences that can support intentions to purchase a product, reuse an AR app, or recommend it to others. Importantly, our review reveals the demand for several avenues for future research. Originality/value: The authors provide an overview and synthesis of how and where AR is employed in shopping contexts, what theories and technological characteristics of AR are commonly analyzed, and what psychological and behavioral outcomes AR has been found to evoke. Based on our findings, the authors derive a framework that illustrates the dynamics in AR shopping and give an in-depth discourse on 13 future research agenda points related to thematic, theoretical, methodological, and technological matters. © 2022, Emerald Publishing Limited.

Etsija's Call: Gamifying virtual conferences with alternate reality games

Gamiikation has spread into almost all scientific fields as a way to achieve beneficial outcomes such as productivity, engagement, learning and health. However, gamification has been less applied into enhancing scientific process and science communication themselves. As a case in point, in this paper we demonstrate how an international gamification conference was gamified through Etsija's Call, a mysterious Alternate Reality Conference Game, to enhance conference engagement, create a positive mood for livelier communication and networking as well as to build a communal spirit among participants. The international GamiFIN conference 2020 was held online due to COVID-19. Therefore, the present paper also contributes to the growing literature on remote work and online research and dissemination practices. In this research effort, we employ both design science and mixed-method empirical work (N=47). First, we outline the process and materials involved in the ideation, design and implementation of the game, secondly, we outline the thematic analysis (n=17) of materials gathered throughout the conference from interaction with the game, and thirdly, we report preliminary results of the adapted Gameful Experience Questionnaire (GAMEFULQUEST) based on the participants' experience (n=6) and the game's probable influence on the conference experience (n=13). Our preliminary analyses show that conference participants had a meaningful interaction with the game which further enabled them to engage with several conference facets, situations and participants as indicated by the qualitative analysis of participants' interactions with the game. Moreover, the preliminary quantitative analyses based on the responses on the GAMEFULQUEST indicate that respondents had had a positive gameful experience as a consequence of interacting with Etsija's Call While the present study was preliminary and a first pilot of the conference game, future research on Etsija's Call and other similar implementations should attempt to increase the volume of the investigation in terms of participants. Copyright © 2021 for this paper by its authors.