2.2.2. Chocolate Trial

Milk chocolate (20% cocoa, Cadbury's) was the sensory stimuli used in this trial. It was purchased at a local convenience store and was stored at room temperature prior to the sensory trial. Three identical square pieces of chocolate, taken from the same chocolate bar, were placed on separate ceramic white plates 5 min prior to each testing session, and presented monadically to participants in three testing environments—a traditional sensory booth, a VR Irish countryside, and a VR busy city. The presentation order of the testing environment was completely balanced across participants. Participants were instructed to evaluate the chocolate for liking in terms of smell, flavour, sweetness, texture, smoothness, and overall liking on a 9-point hedonic scale, where 1 = dislike extremely and 9 = like extremely. Similar to the approach taken in the beef trial, participants provided answers to the questions verbally in all conditions in an effort to retain the degree of perceived immersion in the VR session. All participants were familiarised with testing procedures prior to starting the test. Data was recorded by the researchers via Compusense Cloud ® (West Guelph, ON, Canada). Plain crackers (Carr's, UK) and mineral water (Evian, France) were used as palate cleansers and a five-minute break was enforced between each tasting condition to avoid product carry-over effects.
