Augmented Reality (AR) - a technology that integrates 3D virtual objects into a real environment in realtime - has recently gained a lot of attention and is expected to become a 100 billion dollar industry by 2023. Surprisingly, researchers present a different picture of AR. They wonder about the functional benefits of AR and the impact of AR applications on customer engagement and buying behavior. There is also a striking lack of empirical evidence. This study aims to close these gaps by being one of the first field experiments in which the impact of AR on user engagement and order value is measured in a live environment. The live environment chosen for this study was a restaurant, as restaurants have been found to engineer their menu to affect order value - so an AR menu with 3D virtual dishes could be developed to manipulate the behavior of participants in the restaurant. The participants found the AR menu to be more representative of the dishes and their portion sizes compared to the regular, paper menu. Unfortunately, this did not translate into an increased order value or NPS score. Second, it was found that Perceived Usability - a dimension of user engagement - had a direct, positive impact on order value in the mediation model presented in this study. With these findings this study provides empirical support for what has been found in user engagement and AR theory. Future studies can further explore this relationship and more interestingly, businesses and researchers can use AR and data analytics to optimize and learn from our relationship with food.

The dietary habits changed drastically since 1980 and the chemical composition of a lot of processed foods was altered to meet new requirements. This nutrition shift along with the industrialisation and the rise of the sedentary lifestyle, led to the spread of the obesity epidemic which still manifests in many countries, including European. Children are also affected from this epidemic, with the childhood overweight and obesity trends to grow. The OECD children average for 2017 reached a 15.5%. However, in each country different factors contribute to the manifestation of the phenomenon, composing its unique obesogenic environment. In the current thesis proposal, exploratory statistical modeling is employed, to identify the non-biological factors explaining children's weight for the Netherlands. The analysis is conducted with the use of a custom framework to capture factors which are linked with societal inequities. The outcome of this analysis is a group of factors which explain the weight in preschool children. Also, significant results for preschool children are derived by comparing different screening definitions for overweight and obesity, showing the clusters of risk-prone children. By using the insights from the analysis, data informed policies are proposed to aid the creation of a healthier urban environment for future population to thrive in. Data informed policies based on governmental data for the Netherlands can facilitate the decision making and make prevention and mitigation of the epidemic more effective, by targeting appropriately different population segments which are in need. Future research could focus on prediction models of obesity based on the significant factors identified in this study. Also, the expansion of the current models with more variables from the urban environment is needed to show more specific associations with urban features.

The ever-increasing competition has led firms to higher adoption rate of technology to drive business efficiency and operation. One of the disruptive technologies of this century is Artificial Intelligence (AI), with virtual agents as one of its application. To get the maximum value of virtual agents, businesses attempt to personalize their chatbots by understanding their customers, using big data and machine learning. Aware of the significance of users’ personality, personality has also become the focus in achieving personalization. Meanwhile, personalization through chatbots personality
(botsanality) has escaped the attention of researchers. This research investigated the impacts of personality match between human and computer in e-commerce by measuring level of trust, perceived risk and purchase intention. The experiment did not present statistically significant results and therefore rejecting the hypotheses.

This report describes the development of a superhuman sports multiplayer game that makes use of augmented reality through the HoloLens. The game is a reenvisioning of the original League of Lasers, a pong/football-esque game for Android phones using camera tracking and special headgear for player positioning. The game was specifically redesigned to use neither a camera or a phone, but instead use the HoloLens' spatial localisation features. The goal of the project is to provide a superhuman sports multiplayer experience on the HoloLens. To be able to provide this, a system for managing spatial anchors and a custom networking architecture were developed, making use of a game server, game clients, a master game client and a web server for sharing anchors. Along with this, large-scale playtests were performed, where data was collected. The corresponding game design changes from the original game are described and implemented to ensure an optimal experience. As the game was developed in Unity with the Mixed Reality Toolkit, software quality was kept at adequate levels throughout the project through a custom CI setup, code written with testability and maintainability in mind through the humble object pattern, and rigorous PR reviewing guidelines. For the development process itself, Scrum was used with weekly meetings, a Waffle project board and daily status reports. Numerous problems with the combination of Unity, the Mixed Reality Toolkit and the HoloLens made the project a laborious endeavour, but the final result and design of the game exceeded our initial expectations.

Virtual Reality (VR) is a hot topic; some argue that VR causes a computing revolution as impactful as the smartphone. The infrastructure industry recently adopted VR as a tool in the stakeholder process. This thesis defines Virtual Reality as a three-dimensional virtual environment in which one can interact. VR is applied in several projects which indicates that the contracting authority is willing to pay for the use of VR. However, it is still unknown what the benefits of applying VR in the stakeholder process are. This thesis contains exploratory research into the added value of using VR in the dynamic stakeholder process.