Seminar invite and warm welcome to our new Postdoctoral Research Fellow Dr. Alan Cummins!
8th February 2019
We are delighted to welcome our new Postdoctoral Research Fellow Dr. Alan Cummins to the team!
You are invited to attend an introductory presentation by Dr. Cummins at 4pm, Thursday 28th February, Large Conference Room, O’ Reilly Institute.
Title: Movement, Psychology and the Virtual – An Introduction
Abstract:
Having formally studied both Computer Science and Psychology my recent past has involved using movement as a primary means of measuring and understanding humans. Predominantly using VR as a medium for study I will highlight previous projects as diverse as training and profiling for professional athletes through to floating babies and working with a fake horse leg!
Keywords: VR, AR, MOCAP, Cognitive Psychology, Perception-Action, Affordances
Biography:
I received my undergraduate degree in Computer Science (1999) from Trinity College Dublin before moving into the commercial sector, predominantly in e-commerce application design and development on java platforms. I obtained a masters by research (2003) from the Graphics Vision and Visualisation group in Computer Graphics (formerly Image Synthesis Group) at Trinity College Dublin, with the thesis entitled ‘Real-time Display of 3D Graphics for Handheld Mobile Devices’. This explored rendering techniques (splatting, imposters, object simplification) for display of large 3D models on Pocket PC hardware. I obtained a first-class honours degree in psychology from Dublin Business School (2009) before moving to Queen’s University Belfast where I obtained a PhD from the School of Nursing and Midwifery with the thesis entitled ‘Employing movement-based gaming in the development of an intervention to aid self-regulation in young people with complex trauma’ (2012). I then became a post-doctorate researcher under Prof. Craig at the School of Psychology, Queen’s University Belfast where I spent approximately six years working on commercial and research applications focusing on the design, development and testing of applications related to movement, human performance and perception and action, particularly in the field of professional sports. I moved to the School of Engineering, Electrical Engineering and Computer Science where I worked on use-cases for augmented reality. I have extensive experience in design, development and use of virtual and augmented reality making use of both quantitative and qualitative research methods. My research interests include VR, AR, cognitive psychology and human-centred design. Now a member of V-SENSE I will be primarily focusing on intelligent crowd simulation, semantic processing of environment, creation and assessment of creative VR and AR applications.
Contact details:
Office: Stack B, no. 2.019, Level 2.
Welcome Alan!