VERA Use Grants
Run your virtual-reality study at scale.
VERA Use Grants cover your participant costs and give you free access to a remote VR research platform built for rigorous, large-scale human-subjects research. Apply anytime, on a rolling basis.
What is VERA?
The Virtual Experience Research Accelerator (VERA) is a platform for running human-subjects experiments in virtual reality — remotely, at scale, and on devices people already own. Instead of bringing participants into a physical lab one at a time, researchers deploy studies to a distributed pool of participants who complete them on consumer VR headsets in their own homes.
VERA makes immersive VR research faster, more affordable, and far more representative than the small in-lab samples the field has traditionally relied on, which opens the door to large and well-powered studies that have been impractical until now.
The opportunity
By funding strong experiments and seeding a shared infrastructure and data repository, the program aims to accelerate collaborative, interdisciplinary, and societally impactful work, and to build a foundation for future research.
Using the VERA platform is free at this time. These grants will cover the costs of participant compensation for selected projects.
The program supports experiments that align with the U.S. National Science Foundation's mission to advance science and benefit society, with clearly identified scientific merit and broader impacts.
Award benefits
Award
Participant compensation and pool fees covered by VERA. You request a number of participants rather than a dollar amount; samples in the low hundreds are typical, with larger studies considered where the science justifies it.
Platform
Free early access to VERA, plus technical and operational support during onboarding and execution.
Proposal basics
Hardware
Studies must run on consumer Meta Quest 2, 3, or 3S headsets.
Format
Immersive VR experiments completable within a 1-meter square area, in 45 minutes or less per participant.
Deadline
Rolling. Proposals are reviewed as they arrive, so earlier submissions are considered sooner.
Eligibility
Open to research teams worldwide; at least one lead investigator must be faculty at a U.S. university with IRB oversight.
Contact
Reach out to info@vera-xr.org in advance of your submission.
Who should apply
If your research questions could be explored in an immersive 3D environment, VERA is for you. We especially welcome teams from the VR research community, as well as fields such as psychology, behavioral economics, education, communication, public health, cognitive science, human-computer interaction, and the social sciences — including researchers new to virtual reality.
Multi-institutional and interdisciplinary teams are encouraged, and early-career researchers and students may join as co-investigators. International researchers are welcome and encouraged to partner with a U.S.-based colleague who can provide the required institutional review.
Get in touch
Interested? We'd love to hear your idea. Reach out early to info@vera-xr.org — because we expect to fund a limited number of proposals, the sooner you connect with us, the better. Full eligibility, proposal, and budget details are available in the Full Solicitation.