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A high level of application of ICT and digital technologies enables numerous multiplicative benefits and innovative business models. The impact of a technological breakthrough on the transformation of economic structure, labour market and individual businesses has attracted researchers for decades.
Digital Transformation relates to the fourth technological revolution that impacts the companies' way of doing business to stay competitive. Both internal and external factors are needed to provide and implement digital operations (Tomcic Furjan et al., 2020). The Digital Economy (DE) refers to a recent shift in a series of technological breakthroughs that transformed economic structures and altered the productivity of world economies since the dawn of the first industrial revolution. The term DE is used in everyday communication and is also referred to as Industry 4.0 or the fourth industrial revolution, complementing almost all industries' galloping digital transformation (Pejić et al., 2018).
Developments in new digital technologies are an essential step towards a more efficient lifestyle. Still, mass adoption depends on the two aspects, originality/value and price, if all other factors are constant (Plewa et al., 2012). Although Augmented Reality technology has been researched for a long time (from the 1980s), it has only been implemented in the general population in the last decade (Ghazali et al., 2019). This step has been enabled due to increased mobile technology development, especially smartphones, network improvements and general high usage percentage due to mass production and affordability throughout the world. The prerequisites for adopting and efficient usage of Augmented Reality have made it possible in recent years. The Augmented Reality technology requires a user to have a standard smartphone with an integrated camera and good internet connectivity. These steps are essential as AR apps operate to implement virtual objects in a user's environment (Saprikis et al., 2020).
This paper analyzed the potential understanding and willingness to use Augmented Reality apps among the student population in supermarkets and hypermarkets. The student population has been taken as they represent the most technology-oriented part of the overall population. In the retail industry, super and hypermarkets are widely visited, and their shopping process is well known. Therefore, any innovation implemented in the already known environment will have an immediate response from its customers.
The main goal of this paper is to investigate whether Augmented Reality apps are widely accepted as innovations in retail. In this regard, certain aspects will be taken into consideration, namely the following research questions: (i) RQ1: What factors and behavioural parameters have motivated the respondents' opinion on AR apps in super and hypermarkets?; (ii) RQ2: What factors stimulate individuals the most to adopt AR apps? These questions will be answered using the extended Unified Theory on Acceptance and Use of Technology (UTAUT) research framework.
The structure of this paper is as follows: after introduction, the research framework and literature review is provided in the second part, followed by the explanation of the methodology used, third part, more detailed approach on relevant factors affecting the adoption of Augmented Reality technology will be described in the fourth part. On top of the above, the research is to understand and discuss how and in what ways companies could implement AR apps easier in the retail sector based on this research results in the fifth part of the paper.