The power of seeing less: Diminished reality for supporting consumer choice

Diminished reality is an immersive technology that can selectively reduce the visual salience of real-world objects, altering how people see their environment without physically changing it. This makes it a novel and innovative form of digital choice architecture in supporting consumer decision-making. While the technical development of diminished reality has advanced within computer science, our study is the first to examine how people experience and interact with the technology in practice and reflect its use from a behavioral science perspective. This study addresses these gaps by exploring how diminished reality shaped food-related decisions and how consumers envisioned its future adoption. To explore this, we developed a diminished reality prototype designed to support sustainable food choices and used it to conduct a qualitative study combining think-aloud protocols and semi-structured interviews with 25 participants in a simulated supermarket setting. Using framework method analysis, we found that diminished reality shaped participants’ choices by guiding attentional processes, altering perceptions of product presence, sparking curiosity, and prompting moral reasoning – all of which interacted with habitual preferences to shape decision-making. We also explored key motivations and barriers related to future adoption of diminished reality, including perceived ease of use, usefulness, autonomy, psychological reactance and trust in technology. These findings contribute to the emerging literature on mixed reality and digital choice architecture, offering theoretical insights into consumer decision-making and practical implications for future diminished reality development and implementation.