Editorial: Virtual Environments as Study Platforms for Realistic Human Behavior

As of 2013, US persons spend an average of 37 h per month using smartphone applications, another 27 h using the internet on personal computers, and 133 h watching live television (Nielsen, 2014). Coupled with the estimated 64% of US persons that own a smartphone (Pew, 2015), people are spending a large sum of their waking lives plugged into virtualized, but very real, software-mediated environments. In these cases, and where virtual environments (VEs) are meant to emulate the real-world for gaming and simulation, the psychological sciences now have an unprecedented opportunity to use them as mediums for understanding humans in the real-world (Bowers et al., 2008). VEs can be used to capture high fidelity data about human behavior in a way that far exceeds what can be captured in existing laboratory and daily experience research methods. The current challenge is to harness this data for observing and modeling how people use to manipulate their environment, forage for information, and work with people in organic, unstructured interactions. This research topic introduces new approaches and use-cases for how VEs can enhance the ecological validity of laboratory studies, and the generalizable study of human behavior in naturalistic, real-world environments, even though they may be virtual.