Virtual Reality (VR) Research Studies
Therapy and Support
Soft Skills Development
At Edith Cowan University in Australia, researchers studied social interaction in two contexts – one in which participant and researcher engaged in casual conversation and one in which the participant was instructed to disclose both positive and negative personal experiences to their research partner. These contexts were studied within a face-to-face condition as well as a Virtual Reality condition, wherein the researcher was represented as an avatar and controlled in real time through motion capture. While participants had an overall slight preference for face-to-face interaction, 30% of participants preferred the interaction with the avatar over the in-person conversation, specifically on the facets of self-disclosure, comfort, and being able to relax and be oneself. Researchers theorize that the “increased sense of interpersonal distance in VR may be why some of our participants indicated such preferences for VR over face-to-face for negative disclosure”.
In a recent study out of Paris, France, a team of researchers analyzed the effectiveness of learning empathy through virtual reality. They conducted a variety of different experiments, one being a study of high school students in the USA exhibiting more global empathy and interest in learning about other counties succeeding role-playing activities in virtual reality. Researchers found that immersive VR experiences “allow users to literally step into the shoes of others and see the world from their perspective,” which has “shown significant plasticity of empathetic abilities even after the experience by decreasing implicit racial biases and increasing of mimicry of outgroup members.” The team ultimately concluded that immersive VR experiences are a powerful tool in developing empathy, awareness, and altruistic behavior.
In a recent study at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, researcher Elizabeth Enkin asked twenty-one university students who were studying Spanish as a second language to compare the experience of practicing face-to-face with the experience of practicing in Virtual Reality (VR).Students carried out three sets of two dialogues each, one dialogue in VR using a head-mounted display and one with a fellow student in a physical space. At the end of the experience, students were asked to fill out a survey about their experience. Results from the survey “showed overall positive experiences with social VR” and indicated that “VR can be a more fun way to practice speaking that can also reduce feelings of self-consciousness.”
A recent MIT study enlisted 38 police officers to take part in an VR scenario in which they are alongside another officer who is racially abusive towards an African American suspect. Officers were then divided into two different groups in order to witness the same interrogation again. One group witnessed the interaction as an observer while the other embodied the perspective of the suspect. Three weeks later, all officers were again placed in a hostile interrogation of an African American suspect in a different setting. “The results show that the actions of those who had been in the Victim condition were coded as being more helpful towards the victim than those in the Observer condition.”
The study, which intentionally leveraged affordable hardware and psychologists only minimally trained in VR, concluded that “VR exposure therapy can be effective under routine care conditions and is an attractive approach for future, large-scale implementation and effectiveness trials.” Among the studies finding were that patients’ self-reported a “robust” decrease in PSA following VR-assisted therapy and that the “exposure therapy exerted these benefits by reducing patients’ fear of negative evaluation and catastrophic beliefs.” The study also found that “patients rated the quality of their speech performances higher after watching the avatar perform a playback of their speech.”
Corporate Collaboration
This study set out to compare the effectiveness of group collaboration through multi-user immersive virtual reality (IVR), face-to-face (FTF) meetings, and video conferencing (VR). The study concluded that “Multi-user IVR can help bridge the gap between the main advantages of IVR (simulation and manipulation of immersive three-dimensional objects) and the growing demand for effective collaboration of spatially distributed teams. This creates new opportunities for remote work that rely on spatial interactivity within a virtual environment.”
