VR What We Eat: Guidelines for Designing and Assessing Virtual Environments as a Persuasive Technology to Promote Sustainability and Health

Abstract

Environmental sustainability has grown as a topic of interest in the scientific community and has gained mainstream attention. This paper focuses on issues to consider when designing and assessing the effectiveness of virtual reality (VR) as persuasive technology. We propose a set of research guidelines to inform future work on how to enhance VR’s effectiveness as a persuasive tool. We present animal product consumption as an example to demonstrate how these guidelines can be applied to a real-world problem that relates to sustainability and health. We describe a set of guidelines for advancing research on VR as a persuasive tool and provide examples of how they can be applied in future research.