Dr. Weser will describe the application of virtual reality (VR) technology in cognitive science and psychology research, spanning basic perceptual science to complex behavior change applications. She will begin by discussing the advantages of VR for laboratory experiments and provide an example of her research on weight perception and multisensory illusions. Dr. Weser will then provide a brief overview of how VR is changing education, simulation, and training across a variety of industries. Dr. Weser will conclude by discussing her current project, Invite Only VR, a commercial video game intervention to prevent teen vaping, and the evaluation of the video game in a clinical trial.

Veronica Weser, PhD graduated from Vassar College in 2012 with a double major in cognitive science and Japanese. She was awarded a one-year Fulbright Fellowship to study developmental learning disorders in Tsukuba, Japan, before beginning her PhD training in cognitive psychology at the University of Virginia. During her time at UVA, she served as the project director for a grant from Google to investigate the minimum requirements for a comfortable user experience in virtual reality (VR). Dr. Weser completed her PhD in 2018 and is currently an associate research scientist in the Yale School of Medicine, where she is a member of the play4REAL XR Lab. In this position, she develops and evaluates theory and evidence-informed video game interventions using VR game technology. The first game Dr. Weser helped to develop, Invite Only VR: A Vaping Prevention Game, has won multiple awards and was recently evaluated in a controlled trial study with nearly 300 teens.