Incidental memory and navigation in panoramic virtual reality for electronic commerce

Recently much effort has been dedicated to designing and implementing World Wide Web sites for virtual shopping and e-commerce. Despite this effort, r elatively little empirical work has been done to determine the effectivenes s with which different site designs sell products. We report three experime nts in which participants were asked to search for products in various expe rimental e-commerce sites. Across the experiments participants were asked t o search in either QT-VR (QuickTime Virtual Reality), hypertext, or pictori ally rich hypertext environments; they were then tested for their ability t o recall the products seen and to recognize product locations. The experime nts demonstrated that when using QTVR (Experiments 1, 2, and 3) or pictoria l environments (Experiment 2), participants retained more information about products that were incidental to their goals. In two of the experiments it was shown that participants navigated more efficiently when using a QTVR e nvironment. The costs and benefits of using 3D virtual environments for on- line shops are discussed. Actual or potential applications of this research include support for the development of e-commerce design guidelines.