Accepted for/Published in: Journal of Medical Internet Research
Date Submitted: May 26, 2023
Open Peer Review Period: May 25, 2023 - Jul 20, 2023
Date Accepted: May 30, 2024
(closed for review but you can still tweet)
Warning: This is an author submission that is not peer-reviewed or edited. Preprints - unless they show as "accepted" - should not be relied on to guide clinical practice or health-related behavior and should not be reported in news media as established information.
What catches your eye in the street? An Immersive Virtual Reality study of the effects of billboard-based tobacco prevention posters
ABSTRACT
Background:
Prevention health campaigns suffer from methodological shortcomings in evaluation methods and have been found to poorly reach the targeted population and impact targeted outcomes.
Objective:
We used immersive virtual reality (iVR) to systematically evaluate the impact of tobacco prevention billboard posters on their memorization and attitudes and cravings toward tobacco in a realistic virtual environment (VE) mimicking natural exposure (i.e., incidental exposure).
Methods:
One hundred twenty-one undergraduate students, mostly female (82.5%), were invited to a guided walk in the VE where they were incidentally exposed to prevention and general advertising posters to a different ratio (80/20 or 20/80) depending on the experimental condition. Participants’ gaze was eye-tracked during the entire procedure and outcomes were assessed after the iVR exposure.
Results:
Results indicate that when incidentally exposed to both anti-tobacco prevention and general advertising, attitudes toward tobacco are not significantly impacted. Memorization of prevention posters benefits from a high contrast effect when presented with advertising posters, which makes them better memorized than advertising. Exposure to preventive posters did not elicit cravings.
Conclusions:
We suggest the use of iVR as a tool to systematically evaluate prevention campaigns, and advice for change in the way prevention campaigns are created and implemented.
Citation
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Copyright
© The authors. All rights reserved. This is a privileged document currently under peer-review/community review (or an accepted/rejected manuscript). Authors have provided JMIR Publications with an exclusive license to publish this preprint on it's website for review and ahead-of-print citation purposes only. While the final peer-reviewed paper may be licensed under a cc-by license on publication, at this stage authors and publisher expressively prohibit redistribution of this draft paper other than for review purposes.