Our focus

We are interested in how people act, how they respond, and why. The focus in a particular research may be, for example, on brain imaging during RAVE, and in another it may be on some aspect of motor behaviour, or the distribution of attention, or emotional responses, etc., or any combination of these. We are not interested in studies that rely solely on questionnaires and which might normally fall in the area of communication studies, or broadly within the domain of human-computer interaction.

People tend to respond realistically to virtually generated sensory data. We want to measure it objectively and quantitatively to understand how and why it happens scientifically, and what we can do also as engineers to make it even better.

We put no limits a priori on what we regard as a "virtual reality" system - we include in this term augmented reality, single screendisplays, head mounted displays, Cave systems, and so on. However, we do insist that the type of phenomenon referred to above, the RAVE phenomenon, is at the core of what constitutes our domain of interest. And that immersion in digital media at some level is necessary.

This research has profound ramifications across many dimensions.