Activities

ERRL is a working laboratory at the Faculty of Business Administration. It runs on booked sessions: each one is set up in advance for a particular study, class or build, and a member of the team is in the room while it runs. Almost everything that happens inside the headsets was written here, for a specific purpose. The lab opened in a pilot phase at the beginning of 2026 and has been in steady use since.

Several groups use it. Researchers who need an environment they cannot build on campus. Colleagues who want to bring a class into VR for one session or for a whole course. Students who collect thesis data in the lab, and interns who spend a placement here writing code. Project partners, at VŠE and abroad, who need XR infrastructure for something larger than a single study.

Everything depends on one room, one set of headsets and a small team, so the calendar constrains us more than the technology does. That shapes what we take on: fewer sessions, planned further ahead, with more preparation behind each one than a demonstration room would require.

The work falls into five strands: experimental studies, research methods, building and testing, teaching and training, and collaboration with partners inside and outside the university. The same people carry all five, so the strands stay close together. An environment built for a seminar often becomes the setting for an experiment. A study environment ends up in teaching once data collection is finished. The diagram below sets out the five strands, what each one produces and the resources they share. The sections after it describe the strands one by one.

Figure caption: What ERRL does, what each strand of work produces, and the resources all five draw on.

Experimental studies

The lab hosts studies of how people behave, perceive and interact when their surroundings are under the researcher’s control. That control makes designs possible that a physical site will not allow. We can put participants in an office layout that does not exist, hold the same meeting twice and change one variable between conditions, or place someone in a workplace they would otherwise need permission and a plane ticket to enter. Work by the lab’s team has tested virtual reality as a driver of engagement in professional meetings (Šlapáková Losová & Orel, 2025). Current studies concentrate on hybrid work, workplace design, and how people handle the boundary between work and the rest of life.

Research methods

The headset is an instrument as well as a venue. A session generates its own record: the lab logs where participants move, what they approach, what they do and how long each action takes, and it captures audio and video where the design and the participants’ consent allow. Interviews run immediately after the headset comes off, while the experience is still vivid. A second use is elicitation. A reconstructed workplace gives an interviewee something to walk through and react to, which brings out detail that a question asked across a seminar table rarely reaches. This strand is still developing, and we are open to collaborations that test it on cases beyond our own.

Building and testing

Most of the lab’s environments are written in house, in Python on the WorldViz Vizard platform with the SightLab research layer. Two builds are worth naming. LAWR(a), the Live AI Workplace Research Agent, places a live AI agent inside a virtual environment as an avatar that listens, replies and holds a conversation about knowledge work; the first version links speech recognition, a language model hosted on the lab’s own machines, and speech synthesis. The second is a shared room where a seminar group meets as avatars with spatial voice, currently in testing. Alongside the builds, we test devices, software and licences before they reach a class, and we keep a record of what breaks. That record is useful to other laboratories setting up on a comparable budget.

Teaching and training

Colleagues at the faculty and at partner institutions bring their courses into the lab. Sessions run as scenario work, interactive cases and role play, with a member of the lab’s team in the room to handle the equipment. Group size and session length are limited by the number of headsets and by how long people can comfortably stay in them, so we plan classes with the course owner well before the semester starts. ERRL also writes its own teaching material: a three-part course on the history of office space, for example, takes students through narrated environments they can walk around in. Students who collect data in the lab for a thesis get technical supervision from the team alongside the academic supervision from their department.

Collaboration and networks

The lab trains the people who build for it. Erasmus+ traineeships and internships bring students in as developers, and our current technical lead started here as a trainee. ERRL also puts itself on the other side of the table: in the winter semester of 2026/27, a team of CEMS and MIMG master’s students is working on the lab’s positioning as a client project in the Design Thinking course. Outside VŠE, ERRL contributes XR infrastructure and expertise to funded research projects, and takes part in the LAVIER network of laboratories with comparable equipment in France, Finland, Italy and Portugal. We run seminars and demonstrations for colleagues who want to see what the equipment does before they commit a course or a grant application to it.

Working with the lab

Research has first call on the calendar, then teaching, then everything else. If you want to run a study, host a class or build ERRL into a project proposal, write to us early and say what the session needs technically rather than what it should look like. We will tell you plainly when something sits beyond what the lab can support at present.

Contact: Marko Orel, lab’s director, marko.orel(at)vse.cz