Three Foundational VR Research Scenarios from ERRL
ERRL is a research hub at the Prague University of Economics and Business (VSE) that brings extended reality technologies into the core of empirical inquiry and advanced pedagogy. The lab’s research cluster is oriented toward designing and running VR and AR studies that would be difficult to execute through conventional methods, while also enabling rich capture of behavioural and interaction data in carefully controlled virtual settings. This work is explicitly interdisciplinary, positioned at the intersection of business and organisational research, psychology, design, and applied technology development.
Our first research scenario focuses on collaboration and communication under time pressure, using a structured decision task that mirrors organisational resource allocation. Participants evaluate a portfolio of project cards and must commit to a constrained set of funding choices, while timed teammate messages introduce different styles of guidance that range from genuinely supportive to strategically ambiguous. The scenario makes it possible to examine how communication cues shape prioritisation across competing criteria such as impact, risk, and cost, and how confidence and final selection patterns shift when advice is framed as clear, uncertain, or socially pressuring.
The second research scenario addresses procedural learning and training transfer, operationalised through a stepwise assembly task that contrasts guided instruction with self-directed performance. Participants complete a five-step construction procedure in VR, either with structured scaffolding that highlights the current action or without guidance, relying on their own reconstruction of the sequence. This design supports controlled comparisons of learning efficiency and error propensity, while also offering a clean experimental separation between instructional support and autonomous problem-solving, which is highly relevant for managerial training, workplace upskilling, and the evaluation of digital learning interventions.
The third research scenario investigates attention, distraction, and reaction dynamics through a spatial reaction-time task. Targets appear around the participant across multiple positions, and a manipulation introduces moving visual distractors to model competing stimuli in complex environments. The scenario produces interpretable measures of accuracy and response latency across conditions, creating a foundation for studying attentional control, susceptibility to distraction, and performance degradation under visually demanding circumstances that resemble contemporary digital work settings.
Taken together, these scenarios form a set of relatively fundamental applications that support research experimentation across a wide range of organisational and managerial contexts, aligned with ERRL’s emphasis on innovative experimentation and high-resolution interaction data. More complex scenarios will be shared soon as the research cluster expands its experimental portfolio. All scenarios have been developed using Python, VizardVR, and SightLab.
Built v1 by Leire Cartagena & Marko Orel (April 2025)
