Virtual reality and choice modelling: existing applications and future research directions

Research eliciting individuals’ preferences, including stated preference (SP) research, have long utilised imagery as stimuli to visualise either attributes or situations deemed too complex to be expressed verbally. The advent of Virtual Reality (VR) offers choice modelers with exciting new opportunities. Within VR, the presence and levels of attributes can be combined in a controlled and realistic environment, either resulting in 2D images or videos or immersive audiovisual experiences that can be traversed. This chapter outlines key concepts underlying VR and summarises previous research combining VR and choice modeling. It provides a framework of different dimensions that should be considered when developing VR experiments, including technological aspects (display technology and movement) and other aspects, such as survey duration, motion sickness and the representation of time. The chapter concludes with several ways to further combine choice modeling and VR. One way forward is to conceive an experiment as a game, rather than solely focusing on alternatives and attributes. In such an experiment, the boundaries between SP and RP become blurred and the dynamic and stochastic nature of a VR game creates the desired variations from which meaningful trade-offs and choices can be distilled. Creating VR experiments is a complex endeavor. The development of VR requires an interdisciplinary team with people from various backgrounds, including domain experts (architects, urban planners), software engineers and game designers. Choice modellers’ experience in experimental design, considering multiple attributes and applying techniques that simultaneously account for attitudes, continuous outcomes and discrete choice, complements the experience gained in these other domains.