Case Study: University of Lausanne advances social psychology research with WorldViz VR

University of Lausanne improves psychological research consistency with WorldViz over 10 years

The University of Lausanne sought to study how power hierarchies affect social interactions, requiring highly controllable and repeatable social stimuli for empirical research. To achieve this, Professor Marianne Schmid Mast turned to WorldViz and its Vizard 5 VR software toolkit to create a standardized virtual research environment.

WorldViz provided a wide-area walking VR system using Vizard 5 software, motion tracking, and networked headsets. This solution enabled the creation of consistent avatar-based interactions, eliminating confounding variables in experiments. The results confirmed research hypotheses, demonstrated that VR elicits the same responses as real people in labs, and empowered specific findings, such as female participants improving their performances when exposed to images of successful female leaders in the virtual environment.

University of Lausanne