Research & Studies

VR & Human Rights Attitudes

In this experiment, Bujic et al. (2020) 87 university students were exposed to one of the three different conditions below:

  • View a 360 degree film ("The Sea Prayer") on a screen

  • View the same film using a head mounted display (HMD)

  • Read a transcript of the film with accompanying stills from the film

In addition, all participants filled in a human rights questionnaire (HRQ) before and after experiencing the condition to measure human right attitudes.

Bujic et al. (2020) found that those participants who watched the 360 degree film on a screen or using a HMD showed an increase in score in the HRQ. Those who read the article showed no increase in score.


VR, Medical Students & Empathic Communication Skills

In this mixed methods study by Guetterman et al. (2019), 206 medical students were exposed to one of the following conditions:

  • Use a program called MPathic-VR™ to practice informing a virtual human (VH) that they have cancer.

  • Use computer-based learning control module

All participants had to complete a Objective Structured Clinical Exam (OSCE) and qualitative reflections questions after being exposed to one of the conditions.

The results showed that students who used the virtual human to practice empathic communication scored much higher than the control group. In addition, Guetterman et al. (2019) found that the intervention group reported "gaining useful communication skills, learning awareness of nonverbal skills in addition to verbal skills, and feeling motivated to learn more about communication" (p. 1).

VR & Sexual Harassment

In this within-subject design experiment, Ventura et al. (2012) exposed 37 men to both of the following conditions:

  • wearing a HMD, participants watched a 360 degree video from the first person perspective of a woman being sexually harassed

  • read a narrative of the story in the 360 degree video of a woman being sexually harassed

All participants had to answer a baseline questionnaire before starting the experiment. After exposure to either the 360 degree film or written narrative, participants completed an empathy scale, attitude toward gender-based violence scale, inclusion of other in the self scale, and perspective-taking scale questionnaires. They were then exposed to the other condition and took the questionnaires again.

Results showed that both tasks (VR video and narrative) had a significant impact on measures of empathy and violent attitudes. There was also a statistically significant higher measure of empathy after watching the VR film as compared with reading the narrative.