"Wow, I can augment myself?" Measuring effects of perceived augmentation and interactivity on affective, cognitive and behavioral consumer responses

The paper investigates consumer responses to augmented reality (AR) technology and introduces the concept of augmentation as a media characteristic of AR applications. Augmentation refers to AR’s ability to directly enrich... [ view full abstract ]

The paper investigates consumer responses to augmented reality (AR) technology and introduces the concept of augmentation as a media characteristic of AR applications. Augmentation refers to AR’s ability to directly enrich physical surroundings with virtual elements that differentiates it from earlier virtual technologies. Both the exploratory and the experimental study replicate research design by van Noort et al. (2012) in the context of AR. Additionally, the studies test originally proposed measurement items of perceived augmentation. The results confirm perceived augmentation as a suitable tool for measuring consumer responses to AR and furthermore show that flow mediates effects of perceived augmentation on consumers’ affective responses and behavioral intentions. Introducing perceived augmentation as a concept for measuring consumer responses to AR offers a possible direction for further investigation of AR in marketing.