Objective
The objective of the Virtual Assisted Testing (VAT) project is to develop a new psychological assessment methodology, oriented to personnel selection and evaluation, based on virtual reality. The project should produce a powerful psychological testing tool capable of direct application in a number of different fields.
Present-day psychological testing is still largely based on simple paper questionnaires and an evaluation of the results by a psychologist. This is not the most effective method of assessment, often producing inaccurate results and proving unsuited for measuring practical abilities and aptitudes. When used to make a choice between candidates for a specific professional profile, it can mean high supplementary costs and significant waste of effort.
Virtual reality offers a means of bypassing the variables introduced by the human factor, and can be effective in creating during testing sessions conditions very similar to those the candidate will experience in the real-life occupation. Complex VR simulations, often impossible to recreate in reality, provide in-depth information of a candidate's attitudes and psychological traits with the opportunity to measure and interact with them automatically.
The final result of VAT will be an avant-garde method of personality testing that will reduce costs for companies and simplify the initial steps in induction and training. A deep and smart method of analysis will be particularly in demand, especially one capable of dealing with high-risk professions such as policing, firefighting or social work, where a sound evaluation of personal capabilities is essential. The pilot application will take a representative sample of such occupations into account. The methodology should also benefit employees, providing them with the possibility of a thorough and unbiased evaluation of their strengths.
Despite the fact that VR on the PC platform is only in its early development stages VAT will develop a PC-compatible application, to make the final product available at a marketable cost for SMEs. The project includes the consideration of the most suitable input (gloves able to record the user's heartbeat, blood pressure, temperature and strength of response) and output (VR helmet, headphones and gloves) devices for the application.
The work will be divided into three phases:
- The first phase will be devoted to analysing user requirements, defining some virtual stimulus situations and identifying the range of measurable voluntary and non-voluntary feedback. This phase includes also a thorough marketing analysis in order to evaluate the most likely requirements, level of development and costs for the target market.
- The second phase consists of project architectural design, hardware and software selection and implementation. The main object of this activity is to develop the system software and hardware.
- Finally, the prototype system will be tested with a large number of subjects, and the data gathered used to evaluate and validate the project methodologies and architectures.
The exploitation phase will address five main actions:
- Foundation of centres of assessment, to supply advanced technology and methodology at cost-levels supportable by SMEs.
- Provision of special software systems, either targeted on specific occupations or toward general personality and attitude tests.
- Provision of special systems for large private and state companies, to train new personnel and maintain/update existing employees' skills.
- Exploitation of the results of project activities in the form of royalties from further internal or external development. The research results will also become the basis of a new methodology independent from the underlying platform.
- Development of industry-standard hardware architectures and platforms aimed at achieving higher efficiency and better availability in the VR field.
Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques.
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques.
- humanitiesartsarchitectural design
- natural sciencescomputer and information sciencessoftwaresoftware applicationssystem software
- social sciencessociologysocial work
- natural sciencescomputer and information sciencessoftwaresoftware applicationsvirtual reality
- social sciencespsychologyergonomics
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Topic(s)
Call for proposal
Data not availableFunding Scheme
CSC - Cost-sharing contractsCoordinator
20143 Milano
Italy