Prof. Dr. Stephan Streuber

Virtual Reality to Study Collective Behavior

The aim of the project is to understand the effect of stress on aggression in humans. We induce stress by exposing humans to anxiogenic virtual environments and measure the behavioral, physiological and cognitive effects (EEG, cortisol, gaze, skin conductance, heart rate, respiration, memory, decision making). Understanding the link between stress and aggression will lead to the development of new therapies in the treatment of disorder associated with violence and aggression.

I applied statistical models of the human body in research in psychology, cognitive science and medicine. This included coordination of various national and international research projects with research labs and hospitals. Further I was responsible for media affairs and ethics in the department. My own research investigated the relationship between language and body shape. See http://bodytalk.is.tue.mpg.de/ for more information.

The course was directed towards master students of media and computer sciences and consisted of 60 semester hours including theoretical and practical parts. The theoretical part covered qualitative and quantitative evaluations methods, experimental design and statistics. In the practical part students evaluated advanced user interfaces developed in a different course.

I investigated the role of visual information in social interactions using Virtual Reality (VR). One of the novel outcomes of this study is the finding that the social context (e.g. competition vs. cooperation) and the coupling between the players (person-person vs. person-avatar) strongly affected the use of visual information about the interaction partner but not about the self. These findings highlight the importance of a natural context in the study of social interaction.

The Media Informatics program at the Harz University of Applied Sciences is divided between 50% informatics, multimedia programming and databases, and 50% design: graphics, photography, video, audio, animations and interaction techniques.

Augmented Reality for Medical Applications; Computer graphics open GL; shader programming with CG; 3D-Animation with Maya

marketing video for the STAR-Project (Service and Training through Augmented Reality);