Influence on Healthy Living - Investigating Food Search Behaviour in a Virtual Reality Visual Search Task using the Unity Gaze Operator

The attention we pay to food can provide information about our lifestyle and our relationship to eating. The visual search task is a psychological method commonly used to study searching behaviour and attention, and to infer how these processes relate to the objects being searched for. Efforts have already been made to adapt this method to virtual world, but most implementations remain in 2D, typically on computer monitors. This is noteworthy because, by integrating head position tracking and enabling novel interaction methods that capitalise on this capability, virtual reality offers significant potential to enhance the study of search behaviour. This paper describes our planned preliminary study comparing our custom VR application for advanced search behaviour analysis utilizing the Unity Gaze Interactor, to a classical visual search implementation on a computer. The Unity Gaze Interactor enables interactions with virtual objects and precise tracking of users' gaze direction, providing new opportunities for analysing search behaviour in immersive environments. Our research investigates the behaviours of people who primarily tend towards low-calorie or high-calorie food, comparing their responses across these both approaches. The study started in December 2024.