On the 15th of December 2023, the Ph.D. candidate Patricia Blaga (Ibram) defended her doctoral thesis entitled Using Virtual Reality to Stimulate Creativity. A Case Study on Communication Specialists. The thesis was defended within the Doctoral School of Communication, Public Relations, and Advertising.
The thesis investigates if the exposure to an immersive space generated by Virtual Reality (VR) can stimulate creativity within a creative process. The sample of the research is composed of both emerging and experienced communication, PR, and advertising specialists. At the methodological level, an experiment and a set of semi-structured interviews have been conducted. The main results show that the young respondents exposed to an immersive experience, in comparison to those non-exposed to any stimulus or exposed only to a 2D content, evaluate themselves as being more creative and evaluate their tasks’ results as being more creative. They also perceive the VR experience as being favorable in general and from a creativity stimulation perspective. The communication specialists admit that creativity should be stimulated within a creative process and that an immersive space can help in this regard. However, some are skeptical about using technology for stimulating imaginative outcomes.
The paper approaches a scarcely analyzed topic. Thus, besides bringing together creativity and VR, the choice of the sample is innovative. Using emerging and proficient communication specialists, the approach is very much particularized and, thus, helps in filling a literature gap. At the same time, based on the limits of the paper, a wide and interesting range of research perspectives opens.