Extended Reality : Improving Social Interactions in eXtended Reality

Call for expression of interest description

The Marie S. Curie Postdoctoral Fellowship (MSCA-PF) programme is a highly prestigious renowned EU-funded scheme. It offers talented scientists a unique chance to set up 2-year research and training projects with the support of a supervising team. Besides providing an attractive grant, it represents a major opportunity to boost the career of promising researchers. 

Research laboratories in Brittany arethus looking for excellent postdoctoral researchers with an international profile to write a persuasive proposal to apply for a Marie S. Curie Postdoctoral Fellowship grant in 2024 (deadline of the EU call set on 11 September 2024). The topic and research team presented below have been identified in this regard.

Main Research Field

Information Science and Engineering (ENG)

Research sub-field(s)

Virtual reality, Augmented reality, Human-Computer Interaction

Keywords

Avatars, eXtended Reality, Human-Computer Interaction, Social XR

Research project description

This postdoctoral offer aims at tackling online misconduct in social XR environments. Addressing the repercussions of virtual misbehaviour, the project envisions a more inclusive digital domain, reducing the negative impact of harassment and bolstering safety in the Metaverse. The project's outcomes could potentially influence VR/AR platform policies, safeguarding users and ensuring responsible virtual interactions. This aligns with larger societal objectives of creating secure digital environments for everyone. Specifically, the candidate will focus on the impact of avatar and environment characteristics on the perception of inappropriate behaviour and explore interactive methods to enable users either to initiate mitigation strategies when an inappropriate behaviour is detected.

F. Argelaguet, L. Hoyet, M. Trico and A. Lecuyer, "The role of interaction in virtual embodiment: Effects of the virtual hand representation,"  IEEE Virtual Reality (VR),  pp. 3-10, 2016. doi: 10.1109/VR.2016.7504682.

K. Zibrek, E. Kokkinara and R. Mcdonnell, "The Effect of Realistic Appearance of Virtual Characters in Immersive Environments - Does the Character's Personality Play a Role?," in IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics, vol. 24, no. 4, pp. 1681-1690, 2018. doi: 10.1109/TVCG.2018.2794638.

Yuliya Patotskaya, Ludovic Hoyet, Anne-Hélène Olivier, Julien Pettré, Katja Zibrek, Avoiding virtual humans in a constrained environment: Exploration of novel behavioural measures, Computers & Graphics, Volume 110, 2023, pp. 162-172, 2023. doi: 10.1016/j.cag.2023.01.001

Supervisor(s)

The supervision will be assured by Dr. Ferran Argelaguet. Ferran is an Inria’s research scientist at the Hybrid. He received his PhD in Computer Science from Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya on 2011. His research activity has been devoted on the field of 3D User Interfaces (3DUI) which is multidisciplinary research field involving Virtual Reality, Human Computer Interaction, Computer Graphics, Human Factors, Ergonomics and Human Perception. His main goal is to create seamless interaction between users and 3D virtual content through natural and expressive interfaces. His research is structured under three major research axes: understand human perception in virtual reality systems, improve VR interaction methods leveraging the human perceptual and motor constraints, and enrich VR interaction by exploiting user’s mental and cognitive states.

Personal page: https://people.irisa.fr/ferran.argelaguet/

Google Scholar: https://scholar.google.fr/citations?user=h8NkiJcAAAAJ

Department/

Research                    

Inria is the French national research institute for digital science and technology. World-class research, technological innovation and entrepreneurial risk are its DNA. In 215 project teams, most of which are shared with major research universities, more than 3,900 researchers and engineers explore new paths, often in an interdisciplinary manner and in collaboration with industrial partners to meet ambitious challenges. As a technological institute, Inria supports the diversity of innovation pathways: from open source software publishing to the creation of technological startups (Deeptech).

The Inria Centre at Rennes University was established in 1980. The centre has 30 research teams, 24 being shared with the IRISA mixed research unit. Its  activities occupy over 600 people, scientists and research innovation support staff, including 50 different nationalities. The Inria Centre at Rennes University covers a wide range of expertise in Computer Science, with scientific priorities such as secure digital society, human-robot-virtual world interactions, digital biology and health and digital ecology

The research activity of Hybrid team belongs to the field of Extended Reality and 3D interaction with Virtual Environments. Our objective is to invent 3D interactive techniques with virtual environments exploiting both the body and brain of the user. We focus on novel user inputs in virtual reality such as coming from full-body tracking or brain-computer interfaces. Applications of our research program are for industry (virtual prototyping), medicine (surgical simulation, rehabilitation and re-education), design (architectural mock-up), art or videogames and entertainment. Hybrid regularly takes part in projects funded by the European Commission or on a European scale. It is notably part of H2020 project TACTILITY, H2020 GuestXR and CHIST-ERA Genesis.

https://team.inria.fr/hybrid/

Location

Inria Centre at Rennes University,

Campus de Beaulieu,

35042, Rennes, France

Suggestion for interdisciplinary / intersectoral secondments and placements

A 6-month secondment can be envisaged at research facilities at well renowned laboratories in which the host institution (Inria) is already engaged with in the context of other research collaborations, such as IDIBAPS, Barcelona Spain or Athena Research Center, Athens, Greece.

The candidate must have preferably a PhD degree on virtual reality, augmented reality or human-computer interaction. In addition, the candidate should be comfortable with as much following items as possible:

• Development of 3D/VR applications (e.g., Unity, Unreal).
• Evaluation methods and controlled user studies.
• Multimodal interaction (e.g., visual, haptics, audio)

The candidate must have excellent communication and management skills.

We encourage all motivated and eligible postdoctoral researchers to send their expressions of interest through the EU Survey application form (link here ), before 5th of May 2024. Your application shall include:

• a CV specifying: (i) the exact dates for each position and its location (country) and (ii) a list of publications;

• a cover letter including a research outline (up to 2 pages) identifying the research synergies with the project supervisor(s) and proposed research topics described above.

Estimated timetable