Workshop meeting on Virtual Immersion Research at FernUniversität Hagen, Germany

Isabelle Weissflog attended a workshop meeting on research with immersive technologies such as Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality at the FernUniversität in Hagen, Germany on September 23rd and 24th, 2025. This interdisciplinary workshop brought together researchers and innovators using immersive technologies to study and foster social cohesion. 

The event focused on sharing current projects, future directions, and improving the accessibility of immersive technologies by sharing tools and expertise across different fields, generations of researchers, applied and lab settings. Isabelle shared work from our project "Social Perception and Trust in Virtual Reality: The Influence of Belief- and Status-Indicative Groups" conducted with the department of Social and Environmental Psychology, Ruhr University Bochum.

The meeting provided a valuable platform to discuss how immersive technologies provide new opportunities to experimentally study social identities, intergroup processes, and perspective-taking, and how they can be useful in interventions against prejudice and related threats to social cohesion. Attendees developed strategies to address key challenges like establishing collaborative / open science practices for immersive technologies, improving their accessibility for research and practical applications, and strengthening interdisciplinary exchange.