PhD Thesis

The aim of my work is to create a basis for the question whether virtual reality (VR) and virtual embodiment can be a suitable medium to treat disturbances of sensory body awareness. This involves a series of investigations that examine (a) how and to what extend VR can draw attention towards the physical body compared to non-VR methods and (b) the relation between body awareness and the illusion of virtual body ownership.

By research through design, I’m going to explore use and effect of Image Schema in the field of Data Physicalisation. In an iterative design research process I’m going to create design artefacts and evaluate them by qualitative methods, in order to develop an Image Schema based toolkit to support the design process of Data Physicalisation. 

This doctoral thesis mainly addresses the questions of how body dimensions of virtual representations are perceived in virtual environments and by which factors they are influenced. It investigates how exposure to virtual self-representations in virtual environments can change the perception of one's own body and how sustainable this effect is.

In virtual social interactions, embodied users' virtual representations, so-called avatars, can have different characteristics of appearance and presented behavior. This doctoral thesis aims to investigate the impact of the attributes of virtual others' avatars, with whom one has social contact in XR environments, on a user's perceived quality of communication, and possibly also his/her self-perception.

Today's virtual environments offer only limited sensory modalities, especially for collaborative manual tasks this can become a complex challenge for participants involved. This thesis deals with the development and analysis of sensor substitution techniques to increase usability and UX in collaborative tasks within a distributed virtual environment.

In this work, intuitive use is defined as the extent to which a product can be used in a mentally efficient and effective manner, which is accompanied by a strong metacognitive feeling of fluency. Since available methods for the formative and summative evaluation of intuitive use lack sufficiently high time efficiency, this work proposes two new rhythm based evaluation methods for intuitive use using the secondary task paradigm: 1) IntuiBeat-F as a formative method and 2) IntuiBeat-S as a summative method.