**1. Introduction**

The act of eating is among the most pleasurable and enjoyable experiences in our everyday lives. It is also a highly multisensory experience involving a dynamic interplay between the brain and each of the five senses, comprising visual and auditory cues, smells, tastes, and tactile sensations. While much of the pleasure we perceive from food depends on the quality of the ingredients and how they are prepared, our surrounding environment or context in which we consume the food also plays a critical role. The location or setting, the type of music, lighting or sounds, and the presence or not of family and friends, are all examples of contextual factors that consumers typically consider when making sensory judgements about a food or a meal [1–3].

Despite consumption context playing an important role in how people perceive food, consumer-based sensory tests typically take place in a highly controlled sensory laboratory setting, which lacks environmental or contextual cues. While a sensory testing facility is specifically designed to minimise potential variation caused by the external environment, the setting does not represent how consumers interact with food products in real life [4]. In addition, and beyond contextual cues, a sterile sensory laboratory setting may also induce feelings of boredom, disinterest, and a lack of engagement among participants, resulting in data that poorly predicts the success rate of newly launched products in the marketplace.

**Citation:** Crofton, E.; Murray, N.; Botinestean, C. Exploring the Effects of Immersive Virtual Reality Environments on Sensory Perception of Beef Steaks and Chocolate. *Foods* **2021**, *10*, 1154. https://doi.org/ 10.3390/foods10061154

Academic Editor: Damir Torrico

Received: 1 April 2021 Accepted: 12 May 2021 Published: 21 May 2021

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**Copyright:** © 2021 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ 4.0/).

Although many factors can contribute to the poor predictive validity of consumer sensory data, researchers have cited an overall lack of effective engagement by study participants during the sensory task as a contributing cause [2,5,6]. As a result, there is considerable interest among researchers in investigating ways to evoke consumption contexts during the sensory evaluation of foods, with the aim of improving the ecological validity of consumer data. To date, several different approaches have been proposed including written, imagined or image depicted scenarios [4,7], the creation of an immersive environment, such as a beach [8] or café [9], and the use of virtual reality technology [10–12].

The use of virtual reality (VR) technology to simulate immersive contextual settings for hedonic testing is becoming an increasingly popular study area in sensory science (see Crofton et al. [13] for a review describing recent advancements in virtual and augmented reality and their potential application in sensory science). Research comparing consumer responses generated in immersive VR environments and sensory laboratory settings have been recently reported for a range of food products, including chocolate [11], tea break snacks [14], cheese [15], and alcoholic beverages [10,12]. Consumer hedonic ratings were found to change depending on the context for some products [12,15], but not others [10,11], although this may be explained by the different environmental contexts used across these studies. Outside of academia, the food industry are exploring ways VR technology can be used to customise a unique multisensory experience for their consumers. For instance, Guinness, a popular Irish stout sold worldwide, recently designed specific VR environments to complement the sensory profile of a new range of beers [16], while restaurants are adopting the technology to create more memorable and engaging food experiences [17].

The potential for VR technology to generate ecologically valid data comparable to that obtained in a natural consumption setting, in a faster, more cost-effective and controlled experimental manner, is a promising innovation strategy for the food industry to consider [14,18]. In this regard, the overall aim of this research was to explore the effect of different environmental contexts on consumers' hedonic responses to two different food products: beef, and milk chocolate, using VR as the context-enhancing technology. Beef and chocolate are associated with very different types of eating occasions. For instance, beef is typically eaten in the context of a meal, while chocolate is considered a snack suited to a range of eating occasions [11,19]. As certain products are better suited to specific situations of consumption [20], our hypothesis was that a virtual environment appropriate to each product, may enhance consumer hedonic ratings, when compared to sensory testing booths as the control setting. Therefore, two separate studies were conducted. For beef, two different contextual conditions were compared; (1) traditional sensory booth; (2) VR restaurant. For chocolate, data were generated under three different contextual conditions; (1) traditional sensory booth; (2) VR Irish countryside; (3) VR busy city (Dublin, Ireland). Consumer level of engagement in the different contextual settings was also investigated.
