Assessing the Suitability of Virtual Reality for Psychological Testing

Virtual reality (VR) is rapidly becoming an inexpensive, mainstream technology. VR technology is superambulatory as it allows participants to be examined under standardized environments and tests anywhere. In addition, it can test participants in different virtual spaces, including environments that are unsafe, inaccessible, costly or difficult to set up, or even nonexistent. We summarize the benefits and potential problems of VR technology, but we also move beyond theoretical approaches and present a customizable, open-source VR system (PSY-VR) that allows scalable psychological testing in modifiable VR environments. This system allows users to modify the environment using a simple graphical interface, without programming expertise. Moreover, as a proof-of-concept, we compare responses in a typical Flanker task between a real laboratory and a painstakingly matched virtual laboratory. Results indicate that the VR responses are comparable to real life testing, demonstrating the utility of VR for psychological assessment studies. The predicted rapid advancement of VR immersive technologies, as well the ease of their integration with physiological metrics ensures that VR-based assessment will be the modus operandi of psychological assessment in the future. This will allow controllable, low-cost assessment on a global scale.