Partners

Faculty of Media, Bauhaus University Weimar

The chair of Human-Computer Interaction of Prof. Dr. Eva Hornecker and her HCI working group researches in the field of Tangible and Embodied Interaction, with a focus on user experience and cooperative scenarios. The expertise of the HCI working group covers the user-centered, iterative design process as well as methods of requirements analysis, prototyping and evaluation, with a focus on qualitative methods of user research (interviews, observation, cultural probes, etc.) and creative design and prototyping. In the project, the working group is particularly responsible for the coordination of the project, and the human-centered design process.Prof. Hornecker is a member of the Steering Committee of the ACM TEI Conference and chaired it 2009-2012, Senior ACM Member, and on the Editorial Board of the ACM Transactions on HCI.

Faculty of Media, Bauhaus University Weimar

The chair Virtual Reality and Visualization of Prof. Dr. Bernd Fröhlich and his research group Virtual Reality and Visualization Research conduct research and development in the areas of collaborative virtual reality, 3D user interfaces and visualization of large-scale models. Current focus areas related to the project are collaborative interaction in VR, immersive telepresence, and real-time visualization of large-scale 3D scanning data.

Prof. Fröhlich was a member of the steering committee of the major scientific conference in VR, IEEE Virtual Reality, from 2008-2018 and its chair from 2014-2018. In 2008, he received the IEEE Virtual Reality Technical Achievement Award and was incorporated as a founding member of the IEEE Virtual Reality Academy in 2022. His research group received numerous awards, including his PhD student Alexander Kulik received the 2017 IEEE Virtual Reality Best Dissertation Award.

In the project, the research group is especially involved in the development and implementation of interactive social VR systems. Furthermore, the research group focuses the development of methods for the recognition, transmission, and synchronization of expressive gestures and activities, in order to achieve periodic motion sequences and cross-user interactions in latency-prone systems.

Faculty of Media, Bauhaus University Weimar

The junior chair Usability of Jun.-Prof. Dr. Jan Ehlers conducts research on application perspective issues in the field of psychophysiological interaction design. A major focus is the classification of cognitive and affective states based on physiological parameters, including pupillometric, cariovascular, electrodermal, and neurophysiological events.

Jun.-Prof. Ehlers holds a PhD in psychology and publishes in relevant journals and at national and international conferences. He is active as a reviewer for articles in various editorial science media (including JEP, IJHCS, PLoSONE) and is involved as a member of the organizing committees of various human-technology conferences.

The Usability Working Group contributes expertise in empirical research methodology to study-centered project work. Due to its special expertise in the field of cognitive-psychological mechanisms of action, the usability department assumes central responsibility in the operationalization of psychophysiological events and their embedding in the experimental questions.

TU Ilmenau

The chair Media Psychology and Media Conception of Prof. Dr. Nicola Döring researches psychosocial aspects of the use of modern information and communication technologies including social robots, AR and VR systems. Current focus areas related to projects are the development and evaluation of co-presence by means of social robots and augmented reality for seniors* (CZS: CO-HUMANICS), the exploration of technically mediated physical and sexual intimacy over distance (e.g. www.frontiersin.org/research-topics/15265) as well as methods of empirical social and evaluation research.

Prof. Döring is active as an advisory board member, co-editor, and reviewer for numerous relevant conferences, journals, and research funding agencies (DFG, SNF, SSHRC, etc.).

In the project the working group is responsible for the entrainment studies. Moreover, it provides the project with social psychological and methodological expertise in interaction, evaluation and especially in psychometric measurement procedures and quantitative experimental laboratory studies, but also qualitative user and field studies and takes central responsibility for the entrainment studies.

To the »GROOVE-website at TU Ilmenau«

Brandenburg Labs was founded in Ilmenau in 2019 by Prof. Dr.-Ing. Karlheinz Brandenburg, known as the co-inventor of mp3. The company is a spin-off of the Ilmenau University of Technology and the Fraunhofer Institute for Digital Media Technology. The focus of the research and development work lies on virtual augmentation of real listening environments (specifically: playback via headphones), binaural synthesis, audio signal processing and perceptual evaluation.

BLS acts as an expert for all audio components and auditory issues in the project, since audio-visual interactions between participants in social-virtual applications need to be supported by high-quality spatial audio, to avoid copresence interference. In particular, BLS is contributing research and analysis of the necessary latency reduction of audio transmission and is conducting research on acoustic clock synchronicity-enhancing methods.

Consensive GmbH is a spin-off of the Virtual Reality and Visualization Research group at Bauhaus-Universität Weimar, led by Dr. Stephan Beck and Dr. Alexander Kulik. It combines their complementary expertise in developing powerful graphics software and telepresence technologies as well as human-centered development of cooperative user interfaces for multi-user VR applications.

The company's main goal is the sustainable further development and economic exploitation of enabling technologies for social virtual reality, especially in the areas of immersive educational media and training applications.

It contributes its expertise to the developments of latency-minimized synchronized VR infrastructure and entrainment-enhancing interaction design and further leads the development of application demonstrators in the form of social VR apps for long-term studies.