# The Advancement of Virtual Reality in Automotive Market Research: Challenges and Opportunities
## 3 Results
### Patent Mapping  
The search identified 72 patent documents, of which only 37 are active. We analyzed the patent publication number, title, abstract, active, assignee, inventors, priority date, publication date, file date, publication source, and first claim. Figure 2 illustrates the trend in patent publications from 1995 to 2020. The first registration patent granted by the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) has the subject of a computer system allowing a consumer to purchase packaged goods at home. From 2019 to 2020, results show a slight decrease in the publications concerning the year before. It is worth mentioning that publications may have been left out of the results because of the 18-month patent confidentiality period. We found patents active from 2009 until 2020, reaching the highest value in 2018, with nine documents. Figure 1: Systematic review flow diagram, adapted from PRISMA 2020 [15]. Regarding the publication source that contributes the most to the number of publications in prospective patent documents, the distribution of active patents worldwide is highly concentrated (Figure 3). The results showed that only four countries are responsible for the most significant interest and domain in the technology investigated in this study: The United States of America, Japan, India, and Chinese Taipei. Additionally, the United States has a significantly higher number of patents active than the other countries. In the segment of patents not active, we can also identify publication sources in the WIPO and European Patent Office, organizations representing multiple countries, as long as the Netherlands and South Korea. Regarding the patent inventor group, we identified 31 different inventor groups for the 72 patents. We found a high concentration of patents with a small group of inventors since only four different inventors' groups filled 46% of patents. The I4 group has four publications and represents 6% of the total publications, I3 has six publications representing 8%, I2 has eleven publications with 15% of the total while I1, with the most quantity of publications, achieves the value of 12 documents and represents 17% of the  
Figure 3: Patent’s origin source in terms of the number of publications. Figure 2: Patent publishing trends between 1995 and 2020.  
total publications. The other 54% patents can be grouped in inventors' groups with fewer than four publications each (Figure 4). Concerning active patents, six different inventors' groups correspond to 54% of the patents, with the United States owning five groups. The remaining 49% of the documents are applicable by different inventor's groups with a single application by a group. The patents could be grouped by application, and the authors divided them into four different categories: Virtual store, Customer profile, Advertisement, and Automatic Feedback. Virtual stores are patents related to the application of Virtual Reality in stores. Customer profiles are patents using Virtual Reality to identify the consumer profile, their intents of purchasing, etc. Advertisements are patents that use VR to advertise products/processes to the public, and Automatic Feedback are patents related to the automatic interpretation of the user of VR through their changes in body positions, pupil changes, facial reactions, brainwaves, etc. In terms of classification by application, from 2009 to 2020, we identified patents related to virtual store applications in five patents from the United States and one from Chinese Taipei. Chinese Taipei, India, and Japan have one classification in customer profile, while the United States has ten documents. Concerning advertisement, only Japan and the United States are represented in the Confidentiality Period with this classification with two and four applications, respectively. Automatic feedback in VR classification has only the United States of America represented by patents with 17 items.