Eye tracking within the packaging design workflow: interaction with physical and virtual shelves

Measuring consumers' overt visual attention through eye tracking is a useful method of assessing a package design's impact on likely buyer purchase patterns. To preserve ecological validity, subjects should remain immersed in a shopping context throughout the entire study. Immersion can be achieved through proper priming, environmental cues, and visual stimuli. While a complete physical store offers the most realistic environment, the use of projectors in creating a virtual environment is desirable for efficiency, cost, and flexibility reasons. Results are presented from a study comparing consumers' visual behavior in the presence of either virtual or physical shelving through eye movement performance and process metrics and their subjective impressions. Analysis suggests a difference in visual search performance between environments even though the perceived difference is negligible.