About Us

Bernhard is a psycho-physicist and cognitive scientist passionate about studying how humans navigate virtual and real environments. He earned his PhD in Physics from the University of Tübingen in Germany and spent a decade researching in the Virtual Reality group at the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics. After completing a postdoctoral fellowship in Psychology at Vanderbilt University, he joined the School of Interactive Arts & Technology at Simon Fraser University as an assistant professor in 2008. His research approach blends fundamental scientific inquiry with an applied perspective on improving human-computer interaction.

His research interests include:

• Human multi-modal spa­tial cog­ni­tion, spa­tial ori­en­ta­tion, spa­tial updat­ing, and navigation

• Enabling robust and effort­less spa­tial ori­en­ta­tion in vir­tual environments

• Self-motion per­cep­tion, illu­sions (“vec­tion”), and sim­u­la­tion; Multi-modal con­tri­bu­tions and interactions

• Multi-modal cue inte­gra­tion: Experimentation and the­o­ret­i­cal modeling

• Design and iter­a­tive eval­u­a­tion and improve­ment of per­cep­tu­ally ori­ented, multi-modal human-computer inter­faces and human-centered, effec­tive vir­tual real­ity simulations

• Immersion and presence

Meet the team