My name is Anna. I'm a PhD researcher at the department of Cognitive Science and Artificial Intelligence. I'm currently researching the effect of virtual reality on children in an educational context. Now imagine you’re 11 years old. You go to school, step into a shuttle and fly out to space in Virtual Reality. You experience the world from a different perspective, learn about science and gain new appreciation for Earth. I will research to what extent education can be enriched using virtual reality, in collaboration with SpaceBuzz. More specifically the effectiveness of VR in education, and the (lasting) effect it has on children’s knowledge and attitudes towards the study material, science as a whole, society and Earth. I have a background in Industrial Design (at TU/e), Human Technology Interaction (at TU/e and TUT) and User Experience. I've worked as a User Experience Designer and project lead for a couple of years before starting my PhD research.
I have an expertise in Industrial Design, more specifically how can we design products that are user friendly, and how do we test whether we've achieved this? This working principle is called the user centered design cycle. I've used it extensively in my job at Bright Cape. This also involves creative thinking, workshops, design thinking, Adobe design suite, etc. My research experience started in my master of Human Technology Interaction. I've published a paper during my master about interpretation of robot behavior. It involves psychology research on modern technological principles such as VR, and social robots. Both qualitative and quantitative research.