Virtual reality is a promising tool for experimental psychology, enhancing the ecological validity of psychological science. The advantage of VR is that it enables researchers to study emotional and cognitive processes under realistic conditions while maintaining strict experimental control. To make it easier for scientists to get into the world of VR research and to improve the comparability of scientific results, we have created and validated a standardized set of 3D/360° videos and photos. Study 1 investigated the electrophysiological differences between motivational and emotional reactions exhibited under immersive VR and conventional 2D conditions. The obtained frontal alpha asymmetries show diverge patterns between the two conditions giving rise to further speculations that associated psychological processes exhibit more natural functional properties under immersive conditions. The feeling of being at the center of a realistic VR environment creates a sense of self-relevance. In VR, motivational tendencies and emotional reactions are related to objects or persons within the vicinity of the participant and not to the stimuli presented on a screen. Study 2, investigating the memory performance for VR videos as opposed to a conventional 2D screen presentation, provides evidence that memory formed under immersive conditions created more profound memory traces. This so-called memory superiority effect for the VR conditions might again result from the feeling of being in a scene, thus facilitating the formation of autobiographical memory. The implementation of VR experiments using the database is straightforward as it does neither require much technical equipment nor a high level of VR expertise.

Virtual reality (VR) might increase the ecological validity of psychological studies as it allows submerging into real-life experiences under controlled laboratory conditions. We intended to provide empirical evidence for this claim at the example of the famous invisible gorilla paradigm (Simons and Chabris in Perception, 28(9), 1059–1074, 1999). To this end, we confronted one group of participants with a conventional 2D-video of two teams passing basketballs. To the second group of participants, we presented the same stimulus material as a 3D360°-VR-video and to a third group as a 2D360°-VR-video. Replicating the original findings, in the video condition, only ~ 30% of the participants noticed the gorilla. However, in both VR-conditions, the detection rate was increased to ~ 70%. The illusion of spatial proximity in VR enhances the salience of the gorilla, thereby enhancing the noticing rate. VR mimics the perceptual characteristics of the real world and provides a useful tool for psychological studies.