Virtual Reality and the Qualitative Researcher: An Immersive Frontier

Virtual Reality is a new frontier for qualitative researchers both as a research tool and as an immersive research environment. Social VR, spatial networking, immersive gaming/storytelling, and virtual experiences, ranging from friendships to sex, are fundamentally shaping human existence and culture. In what ways the tools and methods of qualitative research can be used within the domain of VR? How to study phenomena emerging and experienced in VR? This presentation aims to inspire an engaged and critical dialogue regarding qualitative inquiry in the context of VR. As an emerging technology, Virtual Reality (VR) is already shaping fundamental aspects of human existence - ranging from communication, relationships, social presence, embodied experiences, etc. Spatial networking and various social VR platforms are becoming mainstream due to affordable HMDs (head-mounted displays). Popular VR worlds, such as Altspace and Recroom are becoming vibrant social spaces where human governed avatars (and AI) interact in fundamentally new ways through virtual bodies and virtual environments. Due to the immersive nature of VR, this technology creates presence by stimulating the human brain in ways that the person’s body in VR reacts to the virtual world and experiences as if it is real. The emotional, cognitive, psychological, and social interactions in virtual reality will not only change us, but it will potentially change our culture. For qualitative research and qualitative researchers, VR is a new domain and territory to explore and contend with. Immersive storytelling, gaming, social VR, and VR experiences/simulations broaden not only the possibilities of qualitative research, but I believe it will create new research methods and paradigms for qualitative inquiry. As a qualitative researcher and an early adopter of VR, I would like to start a conversation about virtual reality within the context of the qualitative research tradition. I will share how I use arts-based research, narrative inquiry, and autoethnography in the context of VR, and how I envision new opportunities for researchers to engage with and to use this medium