Augmented Reality in grocery retailing : strategic value for companies?

The purpose of this dissertation is to shed a light on whether Augmented Reality (AR) can be a source of strategic value for grocery retailing companies. PromoPad, an AR-based device that provides context-sensitive shopping assistant as well as personalized advertising, was chosen to embody the functionalities AR can add to the grocery shopping experience. To understand if PromoPad’s functionalities were valued by customers, an online questionnaire was conducted as a way to collect empirical data. With the results of the questionnaire it was possible to understand the functionalities that were valued the most, and that privacy issues, user-friendly concerns and/or fashion concerns were not an impeditive for customers to use PromoPad. From this, it was concluded that customers value the extra functionalities AR can bring to the shopping experience in grocery retailing. Finally, it was assessed if AR could be used strategically. In this regard, by applying RBV theory, it was concluded that the information PromoPad enables companies to gather was the needed “raw material” to derive valuable, unique, non-substitutable and inimitable customer knowledge, being therefore, a source of company’s sustainable competitive advantage. Hence, the implementation of AR can indeed be strategic if properly integrated with a CRM strategy from which customer knowledge can be derived. This dissertation concludes that the customer knowledge, derived from the information PromoPad collects and the use of CRM, can have a strategic relevance for companies. As so, this means that indeed AR can bring strategic value for grocery retailing companies

Evaluating 3D pointing techniques

"This dissertation investigates various issues related to the empirical evaluation of 3D pointing interfaces. In this context, the term ""3D pointing"" is appropriated from analogous 2D pointing literature to refer to 3D point selection tasks, i.e., specifying a target in three-dimensional space. Such pointing interfaces are required for interaction with virtual 3D environments, e.g., in computer games and virtual reality. Researchers have developed and empirically evaluated many such techniques. Yet, several technical issues and human factors complicate evaluation. Moreover, results tend not to be directly comparable between experiments, as these experiments usually use different methodologies and measures. Based on well-established methods for comparing 2D pointing interfaces this dissertation investigates different aspects of 3D pointing. The main objective of this work is to establish methods for the direct and fair comparisons between 2D and 3D pointing interfaces. This dissertation proposes and then validates an experimental paradigm for evaluating 3D interaction techniques that rely on pointing. It also investigates some technical considerations such as latency and device noise. Results show that the mouse outperforms (between 10% and 60%) other 3D input techniques in all tested conditions. Moreover, a monoscopic cursor tends to perform better than a stereo cursor when using stereo display, by as much as 30% for deep targets. Results suggest that common 3D pointing techniques are best modelled by first projecting target parameters (i.e., distance and size) to the screen plane.