Inside the Metaverse

How immersive technologies are reshaping the art of asking questions

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What if you could ask a question by dropping someone into an experience? Not in an online survey. Not in a focus group. But in a world, a crowd, a childhood bedroom rebuilt from memory.

🕹️ That’s no longer a thought experiment. It’s what immersive research can do. And, increasingly, is doing.

A Quick Primer

Immersive technologies like virtual and augmented reality are doing more than creating new ways to visualise products or simulate environments. They're starting to shift how we ask questions - starting from the wording, but also encompassing the structure, the timing and the modes of response.

Here are some quick definitions so we’re on the same page:

• Augmented Reality (AR) overlays digital content onto the physical world in real time. Think product visualisation tools, live instructions or navigation prompts through smartphones or smart glasses.

• Virtual Reality (VR) creates fully digital environments, typically experienced through headsets, where users can interact with objects, scenarios and even other people as avatars.

• The Metaverse refers to a network of shared, persistent virtual spaces - ranging from immersive games to social platforms - where users interact via avatars. While it's still evolving, its core idea is continuity: identity, interaction and experience that span across digital environments.

These technologies have moved far beyond gaming and entertainment. Today, they’re being integrated into product testing, customer research, ethnography, behavioural analysis and more.

In this article, I won’t separate AR from VR or limit the discussion to a narrow definition of the metaverse. Instead, we will explore how these technologies reshape the ‘traditional’ research process in five distinct ways, and what that means for anyone who seeks to understand people, behaviours and experiences.

Five Ways Immersive Tech is Changing How We Ask Questions

Research using immersive technologies changes the nature of questioning itself. Here are five key aspects to critically engage with:

1. Context becomes part of the question. In the metaverse, people live an experience as they answer. For example, instead of asking "How do you feel in a crowd?", you can place a participant in a virtual crowd and observe or ask about their reaction in the moment. The context itself becomes a prompt.

2. Questions can be embedded, not just asked. AR and VR allow prompts to be layered into the experience. A digital overlay might ask, "What stands out to you right now?" as someone moves through a space. A researcher might walk alongside an avatar in VR and ask questions triggered by their surroundings.

3. Avatars influence answers. Self-presentation shifts when people adopt avatars. Some participants feel safer and become more open; others may perform aspirational identities. The same question might be answered very differently depending on whether someone is masked or mirroring their real self.

4. Questions become multimodal. In immersive settings, a question might be a spatial path, an object to interact with or a decision point. For instance, asking someone to choose between two virtual rooms can reveal preferences more intuitively than a verbal question.

5. Participants can ask back through behaviour. In co-created virtual spaces, participant actions (e.g. redesigning a space, choosing dialogue paths) become questions in reverse. The distinction between response and inquiry blurs.

Together, these shifts mean that researchers must think not only about what they ask, but how, where and through what medium. Immersive technologies invite a redesign of the questioning process itself, one that moves beyond words into experience.

Let’s explore one of the richest use cases for immersive research: long-term ethnography inside virtual communities.

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Immersive Ethnography in the Metaverse

Ethnography is the scientific description of peoples and cultures with their customs, habits and mutual differences. In the context of the metaverse, immersive ethnography involves using traditional ethnographic methods adapted to virtual worlds. In these cases, researchers deeply engage with digital communities by creating avatars and spending extended time participating in and observing social interactions within these online environments.

This approach treats virtual worlds (like Second Life, online games such as Fortnite or World of Warcraft and metaverse platforms) as legitimate cultural spaces where real human behaviours, social structures, identities, rituals and economies can develop and evolve. Tom Boellstorff’s work in Second Life a particularly remarkable example of long-term research in an entirely virtual space.

Here are some key benefits of immersive ethnography as we understand it today:

• Building rapport and trust through shared activities such as gaming or virtual events, which make participants feel comfortable and open.

• Observing self-expression through avatars and digital possessions (clothing, homes, businesses) that provide insights into identity and social status within the virtual community.

• Understanding new modes of social interaction and community formation that emerge in these digital spaces, including novel rituals, gift economies and cross-cultural communications.

Of course, when tackling research this way, we have to balance the opportunities and challenges of digital research, such as limited nonverbal cues (hidden facial expressions/body language), privacy and ethical considerations and the blurred boundaries between participants’ online and offline lives.

Overall, immersive ethnography in the metaverse is about living the digital culture in the spaces where people increasingly socialise and express identity, applying ethnographic rigour to understand the evolving nature of human experiences.

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Some Inspiration For Your Next Design

If immersive ethnography shows what’s possible at the deep end, here are some lighter-touch applications to get inspired by - whether you’re designing a study or simply exploring what’s out there. For me, the greatest difficulty in adopting these new technologies (besides technical considerations or simply their cost) is, indeed, to imagine what I could do with them!

So here’s what a few research projects have been working on:

🧯 Experiments in safe, repeatable simulated environments. Researchers at the University of Nottingham created a VR fire evacuation simulation to study human response during emergencies, informing how building safety design can be refined based on the tracked decisions (sorry, it was too tempting to start with my alma mater).

🏚️ Empathy-building through simulated experiences. Stanford's "Becoming Homeless" simulation placed participants in the shoes of someone gradually losing their home. Compared to traditional formats, VR participants showed more enduring compassion and a higher likelihood of taking real-world action, such as signing advocacy petitions.

🤔 Helping young people develop sound decision-making. In a pilot study at George Mason University, researchers developed VR modules that place participants in college-age environments, such as parties or peer gatherings, where they encounter realistic social dilemmas: witnessing someone being drugged, hearing about cheating or theft, deciding whether to intervene or walk away. These immersive scenarios allow users to practice decision-making and resilience in a controlled, low-risk setting.

Of course, there’s also inspiration to be found in how industry is using immersive tools. These applications naturally have limited direct implications on research design, but they too can inspire fresh thinking about what’s possible:

👀 Analysis of navigation, attention and emotion. The combination of Tobii eye tracking embedded in VR headsets and analytical tools enables dynamic A/B testing of product placement, advertising and store layout by observing exactly where and how shoppers look and respond emotionally in virtual stores

🚙 Digital testing of prototypes and user experiences. Ford uses VR and mixed reality to prototype vehicles, which enables them to test and explore different designs before building physical models.

📝 Personalised beauty support. L’Oréal Paris launched Beauty Genius, a personal beauty assistant powered by generative AI, AR and more. The expectation is that this will guide and help their customers make better choices tailored to their needs.

🏘️ Design validation in architecture and urban planning. Gensler has implemented AR to visualise concepts during the design process, allowing architects, clients and communities to interact with the project vision situated in its real-world context.

📚 Researcher aids like layered notes or AI-generated follow-ups. Microsoft’s Dynamics 365 Guides overlays contextual step-by-step instructions in physical environments, allowing researchers to study task performance and cognitive load in real time.

As you can see, these aren’t just cool experiments. Each one pushes us to think more creatively about how we frame questions, design studies or capture insight.

Not All That Glitters Is Gold

Ethical research (whether academic or commercial in nature) requires clear protocols and safeguards tailored to immersive environments. Researchers must also critically assess their own presence and influence within these digital worlds.

More specifically, here are a few things you should keep in mind:

Technical and Practical Limitations

• Not all populations have the required tech or skills.

• Avatars complicate the verification and interpretation of findings.

Key Ethical Considerations

• VR/AR tools gather sensitive personal data data like eye movement, gestures or even emotional responses.

• Participants need to understand the depth and nature of their involvement.

• Immersive experiences can trigger strong reactions, so support and debriefing may be needed.

• Public virtual spaces can include harassment or unmoderated behaviour.

Ready, set, go!

The metaverse is no longer just a gimmick. It’s a serious frontier for insight. Used well, immersive tools let us study not just what people say, but what they do, feel and experience.

But with that power comes responsibility. Ethical practice, inclusive design and methodological rigour will determine whether these tools fulfil their promise or just recreate old problems in new environments.

For researchers, the challenge is simple: learn to ask better questions, in ways that match the medium. When participants can fly, shape-shift or walk through memories, our tools must be as imaginative as the spaces we study!

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I'm Andrea, a management consultant with over a decade of experience across industry and academia. I work with commercial, non-profit, academic and government organisations worldwide, helping them capture meaningful insights through mixed methods research.

I write about practical frameworks to help you discover what others miss. My main goal is to translate complex concepts into techniques that readers can use immediately.