1 of 15

Dr. Ali HASKINS LISLE and Dr. Greg WELCH

University of Central Florida

10 MAR 2025

NSF CIRC PI Meeting, NSCU

The Virtual Experience Research Accelerator (VERA)

2 of 15

VERA Principal Investigators

2

Tabitha PECK

Gerd BRUDER

Jeremy BAILENSON

Shiri AZENKOT

Valerie Jones TAYLOR

John MURRAY

Greg WELCH (Lead)

3 of 15

VERA Area Investigators

3

Nicholas COLES

Big Team Science

Carolina CRUZ-NEIRA

Sustainability and Partnerships

Rui XIE

Statistics and Data Science

Jonathan BEEVER

Ethics and Privacy

Center for Ethics

4 of 15

Development and Operations

4

Director of Development and Operations — Dr. Ali HASKINS LISLE

XR Access Lead — Dylan FOX

Development Project Manager — Chloe BEATO

Software Development — Dr. John MURRAY

5 of 15

What is VERA?

A human-machine system for carrying out human subjects research related to VR

6 of 15

Lab-Based User Studies

6

7 of 15

VERA User Studies

7

8 of 15

How are we managing the development?

Enterprise-level tools and processes

We have to manage software development, plus policy and procedure development

How does a participant log in?

How does a participant access an experiment?

How does a participant get payment?

Do we require an ID verification?

How much time do we give a Participant to accept an invitation, and then to start the experiment?

If a Researcher halts an experiment, do committed participants still get paid?

Example Policy & Procedure Questions

Example Software Questions

9 of 15

Agile Development Process

9

10 of 15

10

“As a researcher, I want to export participant survey responses as a CSV file so that I can analyze the data efficiently.”

Story ➠ Epic

11 of 15

11

Backlog ➠ Closeout

12 of 15

12

Figma Design for User Interface

13 of 15

13

Miro for Collaborative Brainstorming and Organization

14 of 15

14

RACI: Responsible, Accountable, Consulted, Informed

15 of 15

15

Ali@veraccel.org

Greg@veraccel.org

https://veraccel.org