Founding Members

• Prof. Dr. Matthias Quent, Magdeburg-Stendal University of Applied Sciences (Germany) The Immersive Democracy Project explores new insights and opens spaces for transdisciplinary debates on questions, among others: How can the metaverse be designed to be inclusive and open? How can immersive technologies contribute to strengthening democracy? What measures can be taken to counter the instrumentalization for hate, radicalization, and polarization? The aim of the project is to gain new insights and to establish a network of experts that can accompany the design of a democratic metaverse. The project is headed by Prof. Dr. Matthias Quent (University of Applied Sciences Magdeburg-Stendal.

• Dr Omar Niamut and Ir. Tom de Koninck  TNO (Netherlands Organisation for Applied Scientific Research) (The Netherlands) This research will focus on how work will change in the future, with technological developments in the Metaverse being at the forefront of tipping over the workforce. Do emerging technologies such as Social XR and Metaverse reduce (or tackle) disadvantages of remote working and 2D online meetings – while simultaneously ensuring that the benefits remain intact? Dr Tom de Koninck, works on innovation for social extended relaity in particular and the Metaverse at large.

• Prof. Pawel Sniatala, Politechnika Poznanska (University of Technology in Poznan), University of Technology in Poznan (Poland). The project’s goal is to develop augmented reality solutions that can improve people’s quality of life and well-being, especially by assisting in rehabilitating patients suffering from neurological diseases, including myasthenia gravis. The project is led by an interdisciplinary group consisting of researchers from the Institute of Computing Science and the Institute of Robotics. It also includes medical experts. Dr Anna Kobusińska, works on large-scale distributed systems, service-oriented and cloud computing, edge computing and fault-tolerance issues. Current work includes Big Data analysis, reliability of distributed processing, specifically consistency models and replication techniques, the challenges associated with the use of blockchain technology, edge intelligence. Prof. Piotr Skrzypczyński, a graduate of Poznań University of Technology (PUT), obtained his doctoral and postdoctoral degrees in robotics from the same university in 1997 and 2007, respectively. He is the Head of the Robotics Division at the Institute of Robotics and Machine Intelligence of PUT, and deputy director at the Centre for AI and Cybersecurity. A leader in numerous national and European projects, he has authored over 180 papers. Active in mentoring young scientists, he also serves on editorial boards and conference committees. His research focuses on SLAM, autonomous navigation, machine perception, and machine learning in robotics and immersive technologies.

• Prof. Aurelio Lopez-Tarruella, director of the Chair of the responsible development of the Metaverse of the University of Alicante (Spain) The Academic Chair for the Responsible Development of the Metaverse aims to organise webinars and fund research papers for the purpose of analysing the ethical and legal questions of the metaverse. Raul Ruiz Rodríguez also contributes to the Network from this institution.

• Prof. Giuliano Noci and Prof. Lucio Lamberti, Politecnico di Milano, Milan Polytechnic University (Italy) The project, undertaken by the Department of Management, Economics and Industrial Engineering and namely by the team directed by Prof. Lucio Lamberti and Giuliano Noci aims at understanding the possible applications of the metaverse in business and its potential economic impact. In particular, the team will analyze metaverse uses and possible reactions by users, levering also on the applied neuroscience research carried out in the team, in order to understand the areas of applicability, the implications and the possible size of the induced economy. A particular focus will be on those very industries characterizing economies as Italy’s, i.e. with a strong tradition of excellent manufacturing and a great reliance on SMEs. Furthermore, the team is analyzing impacts on such industries as tourism and education in which some social, large-scope impacts may be depicted. Michele Di Dalmazi  is a postdoctoral researcher in marketing who contributes to the research activities of the Network from this institution. He focuses on the impact of extended reality (XR) technologies and artificial intelligence (AI) on consumer behavior through the analysis of biofeedback, brain activity, and behavioral responses.

• Dr Sverker Janson, and Petter Wannerberg, RISE Research Institutes of Sweden (Sweden) The project aims to map the current and emerging possibilities of using immersive VR education in the Swedish school system. Questions being asked include: To what extent have VR technologies already been used in schools, and what are its effects in practice? What problems should immersive tools be solving? What ethical, medical, technical and practical considerations need to be made? Which pedagogical VR experiences are out there and how effective are they? What could a cohesive VR school concept look like like, and what do the experts think of that concept? The VR school research project is led by Petter Wanerberg at the unit for User Centered Digitalization at Research Institutes of Sweden (RISE). 

• Renaissance Numérique  (France) launched the “Metaverse Dialogues”. Over the course of five months, it gathers French, European and international high-level experts, including institutional players, device manufacturers, representatives of the video games and virtual worlds industry, major tech companies, big and smaller economic actors from other sectors, but also academic experts representing a wide spectrum of social sciences and civil society representatives. During three one-day dialogues, they will engage in the constructive confrontation of their experience and knowledge, with a view to shed light on the technological, legal and societal issues that are emerging — and are likely to emerge — as the metaverse develops. For now, the metaverse agenda remains mainly dictated by the supply side, rather than demand, and users’ perspective is seldom considered in current public debates. With this international, multidimensional and multidisciplinary approach, Renaissance Numérique’s ambition is to put users at the centre of discussions. This series of events will be completed by a qualitative study led in cooperation with an independent institute, focusing on users’ practices of virtual reality and their projection vis-à-vis the metaverse.  A report gathering the findings of this stream of work will be published in the autumn 2023. It will include recommendations addressed to decision makers and other key actors.
  

• Prof.  Eric Brousseau, “Governance & Regulation” Chair, Paris Dauphine-PSL University (France) The aim of the project is to develop a prospective reflection on the issues of governance and regulation raised by the Metaverse. It will articulate two lines of thinking. First, it will be aimed at identifying the technological, legal, and societal issues that are likely to emerge as the metaverse develops. Second, it will elaborate on the reflexive and agile governance mechanisms to be implemented in the start-up phase of an innovation cycle characterized by a large unpredictability. Other contemporary or past technological cycles will then be considered. Moreover, an emphasis will be put on the interactions between several types of stakeholders: those who develop the technology and provide the services, the professional and final users, the governments and public agencies, as well as third parts like NGOs or the insurance industry. The project is lead by the “Governance and Regulation Chair” at the University Paris Dauphine|PSL. The project will be coordinated by Eric Brousseau, professor of economics and management and holder of the Chair. The intention is to build on historic experiences and present debates on emerging technologies to propose governance guidelines fitting the intrinsic unpredictability and collective nature of innovation processes. These guidelines rely on three pillars: polycentric governance, experimentation mechanisms, and pro-active compliance and are aimed at progressively building shared ethical principles, efficient organizational arrangements and secure regulations and legislations.

• Coordinator: Mel Slater is a Distinguished Investigator at the University of Barcelona in the Institute of Neurosciences, and co-Director of the Event Lab. He has been involved in research in virtual reality since the early 1990s and his work has concentrated on both technical developments in VR and contributions to the understanding of presence and the cognitive neuroscience of body ownership and agency.  He has been first supervisor of 41 PhDs in graphics and virtual reality. He was a Research Award Winner of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation in 2021 and was elected to the IEEE VGTC Virtual Reality Academy in 2022. He is Field Editor of Frontiers in Virtual Reality, and Chief Editor of the Human Behaviour in Virtual Reality section. He has had the goal of bringing virtual reality research to an interdisciplinary audience, with publications in journals such as Nature Reviews Neuroscience, Neuron, Cortex, The Lancet Psychiatry, as well as in specialist journals such as ACM Transactions on Graphics, and IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics. He is a co-founder of Kiin.tech.

New Members (being updated)

• Prof. Sylvia (Xueni) Pan, Goldsmiths University of London. Working in VR for almost 20 years she has developed a unique interdisciplinary research profile with journal and conference publications in both VR technology and social neuroscience. Her work in training and education in VR has been featured multiple times in the media, including BBC Horizon and the New Scientist magazine. Prof. Marco Gillies, is a Professor of Computing at Goldsmiths, University of London, where he co-leads (with Xueni Pan) the Social Empathic and Embodied VR (SeeVR) research group. He has been researching Virtual Reality and Artificial Intelligence since the late 1990s and has particularly worked on virtual humans and movement based interaction with VR. His work is highly interdisciplinary and includes applications and collaboration with fields such as dance and performance, medicine, education, games development, critical disability studies, developmental psychology and social neuroscience.
• Jani Vallirinne, VTT, Technology Research Centre of Finland, working on Metaverse enabling technologies, and activities investigating how an Industrial Metaverse will transform the way people work across various industry sectors. A major transformation of work will happen when teleoperation becomes largely available and frees also blue-collar workers from the physical place. We believe that this drives the adoption of the needed technology also in the consumer realm and entertainment, much as happened with mobile phones. The Spatial Computing team works on technologies tightly connected with the development of the Metaverse, researching core technologies bridging the physical and virtual worlds. The research focuses on refining sensor data from the operational environment into a digital information and the display of that information with Extended Reality.

• Prof. Anthony Steed, UCL,  is Head of the Virtual Environments and Computer Graphics group in the Department of Computer Science at University College London. He has over 25 years’ experience in developing effective immersive experiences. While his early work focussed on the engineering of displays and software, more recently it has focussed on user engagement in collaborative and telepresent scenarios. He received the IEEE VGTC’s 2016 Virtual Reality Technical Achievement Award. Recently he was a Visiting Researcher at Microsoft Research, Redmond and an Erskine Fellow at the Human Interface Technology Laboratory in Christchurch, New Zealand. 

• Prof. Doron Friedman, Reichman University, is an Associate Prof. in the Sammy Ofer School of Communications and the Head of the Advanced Reality Lab. His PhD thesis, carried out in Computer Science in Tel Aviv University, studied AI-based cinematography in virtual environments. He continued as a Post Doctoral Research Fellow in the Virtual Environments and Computer Graphics Lab at University College London, working on controlling highly immersive virtual reality by thought, using brain-computer interfaces. Since 2008 Prof. Friedman and his lab members have been involved in several national and international projects in the areas of telepresence, virtual reality, and advanced human computer interfaces. In the last few years the lab’s research has focused on integrating generative deep models, including large language models, into XR scenarios, with focus on mental health and fostering pro-social behavior. 

•  Prof., Mavi Sanchez-Vives, MD, PhD,  in neuroscience, is ICREA Research Professor at the Institute of Biomedical Research IDIBAPS – Hospital Clinic (Barcelona), where she leads the Systems Neuroscience group. She uses VR to understand how the brain creates an internal representation of the world and of ourselves. Her laboratory combines immersive virtual environments with brain, behavioural and physiological measures to investigate how the input from different sensory streams sculpts such representation – as well as how virtual environments can be used in clinical applications, such as chronic pain. She has been active in the development of scientific theory of presence and body ownership, and their application in various forms of rehabilitation since 2004. She recently led the project “XR-PAIN: eXtended Reality-Assisted Therapy for Chronic Pain Management” and is currently a partner in the EU project META-TOO, on the prevention of abuse in the metaverse.

• Prof. Yannick Prié, Nantes University (France), has been working with VR both for mental health applications with psychiatrists and clinical psychologists, notably on ecological environments for embodied cognitive testing. He has led the TECNIS project (22-24) to study how to integrate neuropsychological testing within immersive teleclinics in the Metaverse. In the IPC4MH project (Immersive Prevention Centers for Mental Health – 25-28), he will assess with colleagues from Switzerland and Poland how immersive prevention centers in the Metaverse can serve the needs of junior and senior patients.

• Pablo Cesar, CWI and TU Delft,  has led the Distributed and Interactive Systems (DIS) group at CWI since January 2014 and is Professor of Human-Centered Multimedia Systems in the Department of Intelligent Systems (INSY) at TU Delft. He has received the prestigious 2020 Netherlands Prize for ICT Research. He is IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers) Senior member, the highest grade for which IEEE members can apply, and ACM (Association for Computing Machinery) Distinguished Member, cited for significant achievements across the computing field recognising up to 10 percent of ACM worldwide membership. His research focuses on measuring and evaluating the way users interact and communicate with each other using a wide range of decentralised digital systems. Cesar has co-directed over 20 externally funded research projects (H2020, FP7, FP6, PPP, NWO).