Author Archive

Posts by Daniel Pietschmann

New book available: Spatial Mapping in virtuellen Umgebungen

January 6, 2015 by Daniel Pietschmann in Publications

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The dissertation thesis from Dr. Daniel Pietschmann has been published by Springer in their new psychology research line. The book is written in German and constitues a revised version of the original thesis, concentrating on the theory and implications of spatial information and its use in virtual environments for entertainment or learning purposes.

The book also features an extensive review of cognitive UX concepts and studies on stereoscopy and natural mapping and is aimed at scholars in the fields of psychology, communication studies and human computer interaction as well as designers of virtual environments. It is available as softcover print or eBook via SpringerLink (and thus it’s free for many universities), Amazon and other retailers.

Guest Researcher: For a translational cognitive science of interaction

December 20, 2014 by Daniel Pietschmann in Visiting Researchers

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Photo by Jun.-Prof. Paul Rosenthal

Brian Fisher from SFU in Vancouver, Canada visited CrossWorlds from december 8-10. Brian gave a very inspiring talk about bridging the gap between between psychology and computer science titled “For a translational cognitive science of interaction”. He also met with the research tandems and discussed their current work and projects as well as future collaboration possibilities.

We thank Brian for all his input and suggestions as well as for the great discussions and hope to see you again in Chemnitz, soon.

Thank you for a great conference!

July 6, 2014 by Daniel Pietschmann in Conferences / General

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This monday and tuesday, many months of preparation finally culminated in having our CrossWorlds 2014 conference on Theory, Development, & Evaluation of Social Technology at Chemnitz University. On these two days, over 60 participants enjoyed interesting talks on interdisciplinary topics concerning the boundaries of virtual and real social worlds and also shared engaging discussions with each other – both at the conference venue and at the social evening on monday.

On behalf of the whole CrossWorlds team, we thank all the presenters and participants for making our conference a huge success. We hope, you had a great time in Chemnitz and enjoyed the conference as much as we did. We’re already looking forward for our next conference in 2016.

Now, after the conference, we are especially interested in your feedback and comments. We will also post pictures and presentation slides in the coming days. So please, check back, soon.

Your CrossWorlds team

8th Conference of the Media Psychology Division of the German Psychological Society, Sept. 4–6

September 12, 2013 by Daniel Pietschmann in Conferences

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Last week, CrossWorlds fellows Benny Liebold and Daniel Pietschmann went to Würzburg to present research papers with their respective working groups on “Emotionally Neutral Cues in Virtual Agent’s Expressive Behavior Impair Recognition of Emotions in Other Modalities” (Liebold) and “Effects of Video Game GUIs on the Construction of Rich Spatial Situation Models and Spatial Presence” (based on the Masters Thesis of and presented by Steve Nebel) at the 8th Conference of the Media Psychology Division of the German Psychological Society. Further talks included “Social Interaction in Massively Multiplayer Online Games: An Evolutionary Perspective” (Pietschmann), “No Evidence for Persuasion Effects of Emotional Advertisement on Attitudes towars Social Groups – The Case of Ageism” (Liebold) and “Gaze Path Analysis of Differences in Task Related Perception of Data Visualization” (Müller). Daniel also participated in the PhD Workshop the day before the conference.

We had a great time at the lab of Prof. Frank Schwab and colleagues in Würzburg and thank the organizers for putting together a great conference for the Media Psychology Division this year.

Conference “Games, Cognition, and Emotion”

July 9, 2013 by Daniel Pietschmann in Conferences

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Last week, Benny Liebold and Daniel Pietschmann gave invited talks at the Games, Cognition, and Emotion Conference 2013 in Hamburg. Their contributions on States of Mind Are Not Merely Cognitive Phenomena: The Link Between Emotion and Focused Attention Allocation During Gameplay and Spatial Mapping of Input and Output Spaces in Video Games both concentrated on theoretical questions and foundations of their work at Crossworlds. Both talks were followed by positive and insightful discussions with conference participants from different research backgrounds. We thank the organizers, especially Felix Schröter from the Research Center for Media & Communication, for making us part of a great conference.

GameDays 2013 at TU Darmstadt

March 28, 2013 by Daniel Pietschmann in General

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Crossworlds participated at the expert discussions on Serious Gaming at the GameDays 2013 at TU Darmstadt last week. The goal of the talks was a get together and a consolidation of different game research groups within the German Society of Computer Science and the creation of a possible new interdisciplinary group concerning Serious Games research. Thanks to Stefan Göbel for inviting us!

VAR2 Conference

February 1, 2013 by Daniel Pietschmann in Conferences

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Keynote from Prof. Patricia Soh-Khim Ong, National University of Singapore on “Use of Augmented Reality in Design and Manufacturing”

The Fraunhofer IWU and the Chair of Machine Tools and forming techniques organized a conference on virtual and augmented reality in Chemnitz from January 31st to February 1st 2013. The VAR2-Conference focused on new research for “extending reality”. Session topics included virtual engineering, interaction in virtual scenes, trends and potentials of augmented reality and data management for VR/AR application. Benny Liebold and Daniel Pietschmann from Crossworlds presented a research poster and a short paper titled “Explaining User Experience in Stereoscopic IVEs via Spatial Mapping in Mental Interaction Models: Prototype of a Multi-User-Interaction VR” at the conference.

ECREA 4th European Communication Conference 2012

November 5, 2012 by Daniel Pietschmann in Conferences

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Opening Keynote at 4th ECC ECREA 2012 in Istanbul

The 4th ECC conference of ECREA, the European Communication Research Association, was located in Instanbul. It provided a perfect platform to meet and discuss profound transformations that are taking place globally in modern societies. While social media was the particular focus at this years conference, contemporary topics were encouraged, regarding the old and the new within the European communicative sphere. Graduate Members Benny Liebold and Daniel Pietschmann visited Istanbul and engaged in discussions about new theoretical research and empirical studies presented at the conference. Each thematic section and temporary working group of ECREA hosted parallel panels at the main conference, including Audience and Reception Studies, Digital Culture and Communication, Interpersonal Communication and Social Interaction. Both Crossworld colleagues are active members of the TWG Digital Games Research which hosted a preconference prior to the ECC. After one week of networking, fruitful discussions and interesting talks with the European Communication Research Community, both graduates returned with new ideas, contacts and concepts for research cooperations within the field of media psychology and virtual worlds.

Visit to Ars Electronica Center in Linz

November 5, 2012 by Daniel Pietschmann in General

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Our fellow researchers Michael Heidt and Kalja Kanellopoulos visited the Ars Electronica Center (AEC) in Linz from October 16-17. The AEC unites art, science and technology in many different ways. One of the projects, which made the AEC famous all over the world, is the Ars Electronica Festival. It takes place in Linz every year in September.

The museum’s permanent exhibition introduces the visitor to topics of genetic engineering, robotics, neurology and media art, while the current temporary exhibit “Out of Control” delivers some insight into “What the Web knows about You”. Overall the center’s main focus lies on interactivity and participation and one cannot avoid the impression to visit a huge playground. Whether old or young, people seem to love it and while exploring deep space, interacting with little robots, or doing scientific experiments – supported by the museum’s accommodating staff members – they learn while playing. Next to the wide-ranging exhibition space one can find the Ars Electronica FutureLab, the center’s think tank, consisting of 50-60 research staff members. In addition to exploring the exhibition our two fellow researchers had a meeting with Michael Badics, one of the directors of Ars Electronica Solutions.

Bernstein Conference Computational Neuroscience 2012

October 31, 2012 by Daniel Pietschmann in Conferences / Publications

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The Bernstein Conference Computational Neuroscience (BCCN) is the largest European conference in Computational Neuroscience. This year the conference was hosted by the Bernstein Center Munich (September 12-14). It was filled with three days of stimulating presentations of international top researchers from MIT, Harvard, UCL, Stanford, or MPI, giving insights in their newest brain research and modeling. The conference provided the opportunity to present new research approaches and results in two poster sessions in the evening.

Beside the interesting contributions of many other researchers all over the world the CrossWorlds member Michael Teichmann presented its well frequented poster to “Learning invariance in object recognition”. The poster reviews his current work and gives an insight how models of the visual system could be designed and trained to obtain human-like recognition and processing abilities. The poster abstract is published in the conference proceedings by Frontiers of Computational Neuroscience (Abstract)

Short Description:

The Research Training Group "Connecting Virtual and Real Social Worlds" addresses the increase in digitization and its resulting virtualization of processes, communication, environments, and finally of the human counterparts. The nature and the degree of virtualization vary significantly, and they depend considerably on the context of application. In addition, media-mediated communication is always restricted in comparison with real-world communication. Our goal is to overcome the current constraints of media-mediated communication. In doing so, we will study which new ways of interaction and communication are offered by the connection of virtual and real social worlds in comparison with the experience of immediate real interaction and communication. The research program subdivides the connection between virtual and real social environments into the fields of: communication, emotions, sensomotorics, and learning. Research in these areas is performed within interdisciplinary research networks consisting of computer scientists and social scientists on a doctoral, postdoctoral, and on the supervisory level. The qualification program is based on the objective of the Research Training Group, which is explicitly focused on joint technology-oriented and social-scientific-oriented media research. Seminars and workshops, some of them to be organized by the fellows, are focused on the research topics of the fellows. Furthermore, tutorials repare the fellows for the challenges of the national and international scientific community. The qualification program is completed by visits of designated guest scholars.

Funding Period:

April 2012 - November 2018

Speaker:

Prof. Dr. Maximilian Eibl
Prof. Dr. Peter Ohler

Office Location:

Technische Universität Chemnitz
Universitätsteil Reichenhainer Str.
Reichenhainer Str. 70, A-Bau,
09126 Chemnitz, Germany