Projects
Emotion, decision-making, and consumer behavior in virtual reality
Recent multimodal technology allows for real-time measurement of user experience in virtual reality. How might these tools shed light on the complex interplay between our emotional states and decision-making in virtual worlds? What insights might this knowledge offer in the context of consumer behavior?
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Multisensory Mixed Reality
Multisensory Mixed Reality (MR) creates immersive experiences by engaging all our senses, integrating sights, sounds, touch, and even smells and taste. As Multisensory MR technology continues to evolve, it unlocks new possibilities to enhance social perception and behavior.
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Transforming and Quantifying Social Interactions in Virtual Reality
Virtual reality (VR) enables social interactions beyond what is possible in face-to-face interactions. At the same time, through verbal and nonverbal tracking data, VR affords opportunities for understanding how people connect in immersive social scenes. In this thread of research, we develop novel methods and study the practical and theoretical implications for augmenting and quantifying social interactions in VR.
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Psychology of Augmented and Mixed Reality
Recent advancements in mixed reality (MR) headsets raise questions about their impact on behavior and perception. In this thread of research, we will delve into MR's influence on interpersonal dynamics, trust, and psychological factors like social absence.
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Design and Creativity
Measuring design performance for effective support of team coaching and redesign efforts has been difficult to near impossible. This is because design is context dependent and takes place in different environments. Virtual reality (VR) gives us as designers, the opportunity to construct and simulate different environments, as coaches, the opportunity to improve our effectiveness in different design scenarios, and as researchers, the possibility to measure design performance and factors that affect it.
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Integrating VR into Classrooms and Curricula
Virtual reality has been around for decades, and the most studied use case is learning. But most research on learning has occured in the laboratory. How will VR work as a part of an actual curriculum in classrooms and other informal settings?
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Empathy and Perspective Taking
Empathy is defined as the ability to share and understand the feelings of another. Perspective taking is the ability to understand another’s point of view. For more than a decade, researchers at our lab have conducted studies examining these two areas utilizing the unique affordance of virtual reality (VR) that allows users to walk a virtual mile in the shoes of another.
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Virtual Becomes Reality – Immersion and Presence
Presence is the illusion of non-mediation. Presence is what leads to the feeling of being immersed in a virtual environment and the reason that virtual reality (VR) feels real. The concept that VR feels real and therefore can have real-world consequences is the foundation for a majority of our research for the better part of the last two decades.
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Medical Virtual Reality
The Medical VR Research team is exploring how virtual reality systems can be leveraged to deliver patient therapy, assess mental disorders, and alleviate patient anxiety across a wide range of conditions. We are partnering with teams within Stanford and beyond to further our understanding of VR’s role in the healthcare industry. Please read below for a description of our ongoing medical VR projects.
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Environmental Education
The Environmental Education Research team aims at understanding how VR can be applied to enhancing science, environmental and ocean literacy in order to help address pressing societal issues such as the climate emergency.
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