The advent of new mobile devices like smartphones and tablets has contributed substantially to the adoption of pervasive computing. User experience (UX) research on pervasive technologies faces considerable challenges regarding today’s mobile context-sensitive applications: evaluative field studies lack control, whereas lab studies miss the interaction with a dynamic context. This dilemma has inspired researchers to use virtual environments (VEs) to acquire control while offering the user a rich contextual experience.

We present a mixed reality supermarket setup consisting of an interactive 360° CAVE (Cave Automated Virtual Environment) installation interacting with a location-based advertising app running on a smartphone. To show the potential relevance of this approach, we conduct two experiments that evaluate the UX of a location-based advertising app by looking into the perceived intrusiveness of location congruent versus location incongruent mobile ads.