ESOMAR Congress 2025: FFIND presents the shelf test in VR

What if you could run a full shelf test — products, aisles, cart and all — without the need for physical stores or flat 2D mock-ups? 

That’s our latest development with Rexee, our immersive research platform.
At ESOMAR Congress 2025 in Prague, we presented the new shelf test in Virtual Reality which was ranked in the Top 5 for the ESOMAR Best Innovation Award.
Traditional shelf tests often require complex logistics: physical spaces, central facilities, elaborate setups and mockups. With Rexee, the same experience happens entirely inside a faithfully recreated virtual store, where participants can move, explore, compare, and buy—without ever leaving a small physical area, but just wearing a VR headset from anywhere. 

Movement is guided by subtle head inclination, creating the sensation of walking freely through aisles. You can push a virtual cart, pick up products, and complete a full shopping mission.

Capturing Real Behavior in Virtual Worlds

One of our main goals with Rexee was to mirror real-life shopping behavior.
Every element in the environment follows the rules of the physical world: products can be picked up, dropped, or placed in a cart; and when one item is moved, another reacts.
Gravity, proximity, and interaction — all behave as they would in a real supermarket. 

When environments behave realistically, people do too. Their gestures, hesitations, and choices reflect the same unconscious patterns that shape real purchase behavior. 

Inside the virtual aisles: shopping behavior in context

One of Rexee’s key strengths is its flexibility in recreating realistic shopping scenarios.
Participants can shop freely, as they would during a regular grocery trip, or follow a defined shopping mission — for example, buying milk, coffee, and cereals.
They can also be given a specific budget, which requires them to make trade-offs and prioritize within spending limits. 

For a brand, this means seeing how people interact with its products in context: how visibility, pricing, and packaging influence real choices — and how consumers navigate categories when faced with multiple options. 

Each time a choice is made, quantitative questions can be seamlessly integrated within the experience, capturing perceptions and reasoning in the exact moment of decision.
The result is a hybrid methodology that combines behavioral observation with structured feedback, making the VR shelf test richer and more insightful than any traditional setup.

Building and managing virtual shelves with ease

Every aspect of the shelf — from layout to product design — can be modified instantly. 
Behind the scenes, an admin portal allows easy management of the environment: products can be uploaded, replaced, or repositioned, and the number of items on each shelf can be adjusted in just a few clicks. 
This makes it simple for brands to test new packaging concepts, visualize future product launches, or explore different planogram scenarios long before physical prototypes exist.

Best exhibitor award: when data collection becomes an experience

At ESOMAR Congress 2025, we didn’t just talk about immersive research—we made it the centerpiece of our entire presence. 

The congress theme was “Reimagine,” and we took it literally. Inspired by this call to rethink research through creative vision, we reimagined our booth as an art gallery where data collection itself became the exhibition. 

Classic masterpieces: Mona Lisa, Van Gogh, Magritte lined our space, each representing a different FFIND solution. But the true masterpiece was the vr shelf test, displayed not as a product to explain, but as an experience to live. 

The experience became the message. Research transformed into art. Data collection became something you could walk through, touch, and immediately understand—not through explanation, but through participation. 

This approach resonated powerfully. The experience at FFIND booth became one of the most talked-about moments of the event and earned FFIND the Best Exhibitor Award for two years in a row. 

But more than recognition, it confirmed something fundamental: when the product is the experience, and the experience reflects the congress’s own vision of reimagining research, the impact goes beyond a demo. It becomes a statement about where the industry can go.

As market research keeps evolving, new tools can open new ways of understanding people.
Rexee is one of them and it’s time to see what it can do for your next research, contact us.