Searching for Products in Virtual Reality: Understanding the Impact of Context and Result Presentation on User Experience

Immersive technologies such as virtual reality (VR) and head-mounted displays (HMD) have seen increased adoption in recent years. In this work, we study two factors that influence users' experience when shopping in VR through voice queries: (1) context alignment of the search environment and (2) the level of detail on the Search Engine Results Page (SERP). To this end, we developed a search system for VR and conducted a within-subject exploratory study (N=18) to understand the impact of the two experimental conditions. Our results suggest that both context alignment and SERP are important factors for information-seeking in VR, which present unique opportunities and challenges. More specifically, based on our findings, we suggest that search systems for VR must be able to: (1) provide cues for information-seeking in both the VR environment and SERP, (2) distribute attention between the VR environment and the search interface, (3) reduce distractions in the VR environment and (4) provide a "sense of control" to search in the VR environment.