VERA Use Grants: Full Solicitation - Virtual Experience Research Accelerator (VERA)

Program Overview

The Virtual Experience Research Accelerator (VERA) is a research platform designed to enable large-scale, remote human subjects research in Virtual Reality (VR) using consumer-grade hardware and distributed participant recruitment. Our guiding principles are to advance knowledge and elevate scientific quality, foster a culture of sharing and collaboration, respect and empower stakeholders, and support researcher career growth.

We invite proposals for grants to carry out VR experiments that align with the National Science Foundation’s mission to advance science and benefit society, with explicitly identified scientific merit and broader impacts.

At the present time, use of the VERA platform itself is free. However, access to a controlled and responsive participant pool, e.g., Prolific, typically incurs significant costs. For recipients of VERA Use Grants, we will cover participant costs and provide personalized support. Researchers who do not wish to apply, or who are not selected, may still use VERA; they would simply be responsible for their own participant costs.

Goals of this grant program include:

Supporting high-quality experiments that would otherwise be limited by time, cost, sample size, and sample demographics.
Lowering barriers to participant access and recruitment bottlenecks.
Supporting collaborative, interdisciplinary, and societally impactful research.
Seeding a shared infrastructure and data repository for future VR research.
Assessing the value of the VERA Platform, e.g., in terms of logistical efficiency and experiment quality.

Proposals are accepted on a rolling basis. If you are interested, please reach out to us at grants@vera-xr.org with a one-page summary of your experiment idea — we are happy to discuss and provide feedback before you invest heavily in a proposal. Because we expect to fund a limited number of proposals based on available grant funds, we encourage you to reach out early.

Eligibility: Who May Apply

VERA Use Grants are open to research teams worldwide. To support the required institutional oversight, at least one Lead Investigator must be a faculty member at a U.S. university with an Institutional Review Board (IRB) that will be responsible for approving the experiment. International researchers are strongly encouraged to apply by partnering with a U.S.-based colleague who can serve in this lead role — this requirement is about institutional review, not about excluding international scholars.

Multi-institutional and interdisciplinary teams are encouraged, including teams that include researchers outside the typical VR community.
Early-career researchers and students may participate as co-investigators.
A final determination of eligibility will be made by the VERA team.
An individual may not serve as a Lead Investigator or co-investigator on more than two proposals submitted within any consecutive six-month period.
Researchers are encouraged to reach out to us with any questions about the team.

Eligible Experiments

Eligible experiments must meet the following criteria:

Experiments must involve an immersive experience (typically VR).
Experiments must be executable using Meta Quest 2, 3, or 3S.
Participants must be able to complete the experiment while remaining within a 1-meter square area.
Target completion time should generally be 45 minutes or less per participant.
Longitudinal and multi-session experiments are permitted. Applicants may structure their use of granted resources as they see fit, provided the plan is clearly described and justified in the proposal, and total participant burden remains reasonable.
Emphasis must be placed on participant safety. Because experiments are conducted remotely on participants’ own VR hardware, applicants must design experiments that participants can complete safely while remaining within a 1-meter square area. Proposals should describe how participants will be informed of VR-related physical risks (e.g., disorientation, collisions, motion discomfort) and instructed to maintain a clear, safe environment. VERA will require participants to acknowledge an assumption-of-risk and safety disclaimer as a condition of participation.

What Selected Projects Will Receive

Selected projects will receive:

Early access to the VERA remote VR research platform at no cost.
Technical and operational support during experiment onboarding and execution.
Participant compensation, paid by VERA, typically (at this time) using Prolific. See Section 8 for budget details.

Expectations and Obligations

Selected teams will be expected to:

Conduct the approved experiment within the time limits established at the time of award. We anticipate setting a spending/execution deadline of a fixed number of days from the award date depending on the scope of the proposed work (typically 6 months), with extensions possible given adequate justification as judged by VERA.
Provide a written post-experiment report. VERA will provide its required contents and format after the award is granted.
Indicate an understanding that when an Experiment involves multiple Institutions or collaborators, the Lead Institution will remain the Experiment Data owner. Rights and responsibilities among collaborating Institutions, including rights to access, analyze, and publish data, will be governed by a separate VERA Data Use Agreement (VDUA) or comparable written agreement executed between the Lead Institution and each collaborating Institution. Notwithstanding the foregoing, the University of Central Florida will be a named party to applicable data use agreements and will be granted non-exclusive, non-transferable rights to use Experiment Data for platform operations, research support, and future data-sharing functionality, including the dissemination of deidentified datasets, in accordance with applicable Law and these terms.
Indicate an understanding that their de-identified data will be made available to other researchers in the future, after an embargo period designed to allow the original researchers to publish their results first (typically six months, with extensions possible). Shared data will be de-identified and handled in accordance with applicable human subjects research regulations.
Acknowledge VERA support in publications and presentations using specific language provided by VERA after the award.
Agree, as a condition of the award, that VERA may publicly announce the award — including the experiment title, the names of the researchers, the award amount, and the anticipated timeframe. No further details of the work will be disclosed by VERA without the team’s consent.
Acknowledge that VERA may offer an award smaller than the amount requested. Applicants should be prepared to confirm their ability and willingness to carry out a viable version of the work at a reduced amount.

Ethical and Compliance Requirements

All projects must satisfy the following:

Investigators must plan for and obtain Institutional Review Board (IRB) approval at the home institution of a designated U.S.-employed member of the team.
IRB approval must be obtained prior to experiment launch.
Experiments must follow standard ethical practices for informed consent and privacy. Researchers who download the data must adhere to the data protection requirements governed by the U.S. IRB Common Rule (45 CFR 46, Subpart A).

Proposal Requirements

Proposals must be no more than six pages (not including biographical sketches or references), single-spaced, U.S. letter-sized, 12 pt font, with 1-inch margins.

To ensure consistent and efficient review, proposals must be organized using the following section headings, in this order, and must address each one explicitly. View a proposal template here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1rp1HyB1L67D6daD5Hr3aq7xOfIf-24xUudIxn5gCIyM/edit?usp=sharing

Experiment Title — A concise title for the experiment.
Lead Investigator — Identification of a single Lead Investigator, who must meet the U.S.-faculty eligibility requirement in Section 2.
Research Team — Names, affiliations, email addresses, and web links or short bios for the entire team.
Summary — A summary of the experiment and expected outcomes.
Background and Motivation — The background and motivation for the experiment.
Intellectual Merit — The intellectual merit of the work, as defined by the U.S. National Science Foundation.
Broader Impacts — The broader impacts of the work, as defined by the U.S. National Science Foundation.
Alignment with VERA’s Values — How the project aligns with VERA’s guiding principles described above (advancing knowledge and scientific quality; sharing and collaboration; respecting and empowering stakeholders; supporting researcher career growth).
Experiment Procedure — The experimental procedure, including confirmation that the experiment can be carried out using consumer Meta Quest 2, 3, or 3S headsets, that a participant can complete it without moving outside a 1-meter square area, and the estimated completion time per participant.
Participants and Use Strategy — The number of participants requested and a justification, including the participant use strategy — e.g., iterative test sessions with a small number of participants, followed by a final series of sessions carried out in batches. (The speed of VERA experiment execution means resources can be consumed very quickly; researchers should plan accordingly and include that plan here.)
Target Population and Demographics — The target participant demographics and justification.
Budget — See the Budget requirements below.
IRB Plan — Plans for IRB approval at the institution of the designated U.S. researcher.
Biographical Sketches — A one-paragraph biographical sketch of each team member. Not counted toward the page limit.
References — A separate References section. Not counted toward the page limit.

Budget and Budget Justification

The Budget section should describe the participant resources your study needs — chiefly how many participants you are requesting, where they come from, and how you will use them. You do not need to calculate exact dollar amounts; VERA covers participant compensation and any participant-pool fees, and will help translate your plan into a budget. Please address two parts:

Participants and resources. The number of participants you are requesting, the participant source (e.g., Prolific or a comparable pool), the approximate session length, and how participants will be used — for example, iterative pilot sessions followed by a larger final batch.
Justification (prose). Why this number of participants is appropriate, how any phasing relates to your study’s design, and what each sample or phase would allow you to learn.

You do not need to work out per-participant costs or service fees yourself. VERA covers participant compensation and the associated participant-pool fees (for example, Prolific’s overhead rate), so you can express your request primarily in terms of participants. If you are unsure of the right number, propose a range and we will help translate it into a workable budget.

To give a sense of scale, some examples of current and planned VERA experiments:

A study of roughly 250 participants (about 30 minutes each, drawn from Prolific) examining how a range of demographic factors affect simulator sickness in VR.
A multi-phase behavioral study that scales from a roughly 15-participant usability pilot, to a 30–40-participant validation study, to a 100–200-participant full experiment, examining how people attend to, navigate, and evaluate information in VR.

Sample sizes of these magnitudes are entirely feasible. Larger samples may be possible where the scientific outcomes clearly justify them. We encourage you to think ambitiously about what a well-powered VR study could achieve. Nevertheless, your request should be sized to your research questions, not to maximize the participant count for its own sake.

Applicants are encouraged (but not required) to offer more than one option (e.g., different sample sizes or scopes), each with an explanation of the tradeoffs: what each option would allow the team to learn, and what it would not be able to discern. Applicants should be aware that VERA may choose to fund only one of the offered options.

Timeline and Process

Proposals are accepted on a rolling basis. We anticipate reviewing proposals as they arrive and encourage early submission — earlier proposals can be considered sooner, while program resources remain most available. 

The application process has the following steps:

Submit a one-page overview to grants@vera-xr.io that summarizes, in brief, the experiment idea and relevant details.
Receive a response from us indicating whether to proceed to a full proposal, whether we should meet and discuss first, or how best to refine the idea.
If invited to proceed, prepare and submit the full proposal described under Proposal Requirements.
Take part in any follow-up discussion we may request.
Receive a funding decision and, if awarded, begin work.

The one-page overview does not need to follow any particular format — continuous prose, section headings, or whatever structure communicates the idea best is fine; if anything is unclear to us, we will tell you. Its purpose is to help you focus your proposal in the most promising direction before you invest heavily in writing it.

Separately, you are welcome to reach out to us at grants@vera-xr.org at any time with any questions or to discuss an idea informally.

General Conditions

This solicitation describes VERA’s current plans and is intended to help researchers prepare proposals. It is not an offer, contract, or commitment, and it creates no obligation on the part of VERA. VERA reserves the right, in its sole discretion and at any time, to modify, pause, or discontinue this program or solicitation; to change the eligibility criteria, requirements, review process, deadlines, award sizes, and any other terms stated here; to make, decline to make, or withdraw any award for any reason; and to select or decline proposals without regard to the stated criteria where VERA determines that doing so serves the goals of the program. Any specific numbers, dates, limits, and timeframes stated in this solicitation (for example, completion-time and page limits, submission and execution deadlines, and embargo periods) reflect current expectations only and are subject to change without notice.

All VERA Use Grants are contingent on the availability of funds. VERA is under no obligation to make any award and may adjust the number and size of awards at any time based on available funding and program priorities.