The MAPP Centre and the Commercial and Retail Management group have jointly developed a VR Retail lab. This was funded by FOODHAY - FOODHAY is the Food and Health Open Laboratory, funded by the Ministry of Higher Education and Science.
VR Retail Lab
A flexible virtual reality research environment
Welcome to VR Retail Lab,
Denmark's first open source virtual reality research environment for commercial and retail settings.
About VR Retail Lab
Founded in 2021, the VR Retail Lab is a state-of-the-art research environment designed to explore how people think, move, shop, and make decisions in immersive retail settings. Built on a Unity-based virtual supermarket environment and informed by advanced sensory, biometric, and behavioural research, the lab enables fully controlled yet highly realistic simulations of in-store experiences.
Our virtual retail environment replicates a modern supermarket layout and supports scalable, customizable configurations. It features a high-resolution grocery assortment across 10+ product categories, dynamic lighting, shelf displays, and animated NPC shoppers, creating the feeling of a natural shopping crowd. The system supports multiplayer scenarios for up to 100 simultaneous shoppers, allowing the study of social influence and crowd dynamics in retail behaviour.
The VR Retail Lab integrates multimodal measurement technologies to capture complete behavioural journeys, including:
- Eye-tracking: What shoppers see, notice, ignore, or repeatedly revisit.
- Hand & gesture tracking: How shoppers interact with products, shelves, and the environment.
- Movement tracking: Navigation patterns, approach or avoidance behaviour, and in-store paths.
- Action & event logs: Every pick, move, comparison, substitution, and purchase attempt.
We aim to push the boundaries of how retail environments are studied, designed, and optimized. By merging VR technology, behavioural science, and AI-driven analytics, the VR Retail Lab enables retailers, manufacturers, and researchers to design evidence-based innovations that improve shopper experience, store performance, and decision-making processes.
