I am a psycho-physicist and Cognitive Scientist who’s excited about study­ing how humans orient in vir­tual and real envi­ron­ments. I received my PhD in Physics from the Tübingen University in Germany and researched for a decade in the Virtual Reality group of the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics in Germany. After a post-doc in Psychology at Vanderbilt University I joined the School of Interactive Arts & Technology of Simon Fraser University as an assis­tant pro­fes­sor in 2008. My research approach com­bines fun­da­men­tal sci­en­tific research with an applied per­spec­tive of improv­ing human-computer interaction.

I com­bine multi-disciplinary research approaches and immer­sive vir­tual envi­ron­ments to inves­ti­gate what con­sti­tutes effec­tive, robust, embod­ied and intu­itive human spa­tial cog­ni­tion, ori­en­ta­tion and behav­iour (and many other things as you can see on the projects pages). This fun­da­men­tal knowl­edge is used to guide the design of novel, more effec­tive human-computer inter­faces and inter­ac­tion par­a­digms that enable sim­i­lar processes in computer-mediated envi­ron­ments like vir­tual real­ity (VR) and multi-media. These improved inter­faces can then enable and inspire fur­ther research, both fun­da­men­tal and applied.