Does personalized virtual try-on turn imagination into reality?
Consumer decision-making varies by levels of spatial processing perception
Personalized virtual try-on enhances consumers’ product imagination and strengthens psychological confidence in purchase decisions. Notably, these effects are more pronounced among consumers with lower levels of spatial processing perception.
When shopping for clothing online, how confident can we be without actually trying the product on? In digital shopping environments, consumers often experience uncertainty—such as “Will this really suit me?”—due to the inability to physically interact with products. To address this limitation, virtual try-on technology has emerged. More recently, beyond basic virtual fitting, personalized virtual try-on technologies that reflect individual body shapes and styles have been rapidly advancing.
Professor Seeun Kim of Sungkyunkwan University, in collaboration with a research team from Oklahoma State University, conducted an empirical study examining the impact of personalized virtual try-on on consumer decision-making. The research focused particularly on how easily consumers can imagine products and how this process contributes to psychological confidence in purchase decisions. The findings revealed that personalized virtual try-on significantly enhances product imagination. By viewing virtual images that closely resemble their own bodies, consumers are able to vividly imagine themselves wearing the product.
This imagination extends beyond a simple cognitive process and directly influences decision-making. The more vividly consumers can imagine a product, the more comfortable and confident they feel about their choices. This suggests that virtual try-on reduces uncertainty—such as “Will this product suit me?”—and facilitates more stable decision-making.
Interestingly, these effects were not uniform across all consumers. The study identified spatial processing perception—an individual cognitive trait—as a key moderating factor. The effects of virtual try-on were stronger among consumers with lower spatial processing ability. This can be explained by the fact that individuals who have difficulty mentally visualizing products rely more heavily on the visual information provided by virtual try-on. In contrast, consumers with higher spatial processing ability can already imagine products effectively, making the additional benefits of virtual try-on relatively limited.
In other words, personalized virtual try-on is not merely a “better technology,” but rather a technology that is more beneficial for certain consumers. This study is meaningful in that it uncovers the underlying mechanism through which virtual try-on goes beyond visual experience to influence consumers’ psychological decision-making processes. By identifying how product imagination translates into decision comfort, the research provides important implications for designing consumer experiences in online shopping environments.
Looking ahead, fashion and e-commerce companies should move beyond simply adopting new technologies and instead develop personalized strategies that align with consumers’ cognitive characteristics to deliver more effective shopping experiences.
The study has been published in the internationally recognized SSCI journal Journal of Research in Interactive Marketing.
Journal
Journal of Research in Interactive Marketing
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