VR Testing System - Psychology UAL
Design and development of Virtual Reality tests for the Psychology department at the University of Almeria, focused on research involving juvenile offenders.
The Challenge
Traditional psychological assessment methods with juvenile offenders suffer from social desirability bias and artificial contexts that limit the validity of collected data.
Results
- Fully functional VR system for psychological research
- Integration with academic research protocols
- Automated behavioral data collection
- Full autonomy in development and implementation
The Solution
I developed Virtual Reality environments that simulate controlled situations where participants respond more naturally. Behavioral data is automatically collected during sessions.
Motivation
I did my Psychology internship in this department, which had these needs. Since I had a computer science degree (ASIR), they invested in training me in programming and game dev. Psychology and technology are my two fields.
Challenges
Adapting psychological tests to VR required validating that results were equivalent to traditional methods, since they're different mediums with different problems. Luckily, the researchers were my former professors and we understood each other perfectly on requirements.
Learnings
I learned that timelines in academic research are very different from software development, and that working with humans — scheduling them, testing and verifying — involves much more work than it seems.
Context
Together with a colleague, we won an award from the Social Council of the University of Almeria. I collaborated for 1 year with the department (with Atlas it was 2 more years).