Marc O. Ernst is Professor of Applied Cognitive Psychology at Ulm University (Faculty of Computer Science, Engineering and Psychology). He studied physics in Heidelberg and Frankfurt, recieved his PhD from the University of Tuebingen (2000) for work conducted at the Max Planck Institute of Biological Cybernetics - earning both the Attempto Prize and the Otto Hahn Medal - and subsequently completed a postdoc with Martin Banks at UC Berkeley. He then returned to the MPI Tuebingen as Principal Investigator and later led the Max Planck Research Group on Human Multisensory Perception and Action. In 2011 he joined Bielefeld University as Chair of Cognitive Neuroscience and Director of the ZiF, before moving to Ulm University in 2016, where he also served as co-dean and head of the Psychology and Education Institute (2018-2020). His research focuses on multisensory perception, sensorimotor integration, and virtual/mixed reality, with over 100 publications in journals including Nature, Science and Current Biology. He has coordinated and contributed to numerous EU projects (e.g., CyberWalk, ImmerSence, WEARHAP) and is Editor-in-Chief of Multisensory Research, and the Springer book series on Touch and Haptic systems. He is a founding member and former President of the EuroHaptics Society and has served on editorial boards, review panels and advisory committees internationally.
Keynote presentation: Two Ears, One Space: Locating Natural Sounds in Real and Virtual Worlds Localizing sound in elevation is thought to rely on matching the spectral fingerprint the head and pinnae impose on a sound to a stored template. This works for flat-spectrum test tones, but everyday sounds — voices, footsteps, rustling leaves — carry their own rich spectral structure, which becomes entangled with the direction-dependent filtering the auditory system needs, making elevation an ill-posed inference problem. Our most recent work shows that listeners resolve this not by monaural template-matching, nor primarily by moving the head to sample the scene — head motion gave no reliable benefit for natural sounds — but by exploiting the disparity between the two ears' spectra: since the source spectrum is common to both ears while directional filtering differs systematically, comparing the ears cancels the sound's own spectral signature and isolates location information. A generative spectral-template model accounts for this pattern, identifying binaural spectral comparison as the computational basis of elevation hearing for real-world sounds. This fits a broader picture of how listeners cope with natural, ambiguous sound. It builds on our earlier finding that the brain also exploits learned pitch–elevation regularities in natural scenes — a prior so ingrained it is mirrored in the shape of the outer ear itself — and on classic evidence that the underlying cue map is not fixed but continuously recalibrated through experience, as shown by rapid relearning after the spectral cues are physically altered. Together, these findings raise concrete questions for rendering spatial audio in VR: naturalistic source spectra, individualized binaural cues, and the limited, context-dependent value of head-tracking for disambiguation all deserve more attention. I will illustrate this with our new VR audition setups and preview ongoing work on active listening during navigation, where self-motion may play a rather different role than in static elevation judgments.
Victoria Interrante is a CSE Distinguished Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Minnesota, where she has been a faculty member since 1998. Prior to that, she earned her PhD in 1996 from UNC Chapel Hill under the joint mentorship of Henry Fuchs and Stephen Pizer, and worked for 2 years as a postdoc at ICASE, in NASA Langley. Her current research broadly focuses on improving the human experience in immersive virtual environments, and spans a variety of topics besides VR nature immersion, including cybersickness mitigation and the development and deployment of realistic virtual human avatars. Prof. Interrante is a longtime participant in the ACM SAP community, having co-chaired the inaugural APGV symposium in 2004, and served as an associate editor for ACM TAP for over 20 years, including a 6-year stint as co-editor-in-chief from 2015-2021. In 2020, she received the IEEE VGTC Virtual Reality Career Award for her lifetime contributions to visualization and visual perception for augmented and virtual reality, and she was inducted in 2022 into the IEEE VGTC VR Academy.
Keynote presentation: Harnessing the Potential of Virtual Reality Nature Immersion to Improve Well-Being: The restorative impacts of real world nature immersion have been widely noted and studied by researchers from a variety of different fields. More recently, interest has been growing in exploring the potential of immersive VR or XR technologies to support similarly positive outcomes. In this talk, I will begin by briefly reviewing the prevailing theoretical foundations for the beneficial impacts of nature immersion, focusing on how this understanding can inform efforts to design and implement optimal virtual nature contact experiences, and will then give an overview of the research efforts that I and my colleagues have been engaged in over the past ~4-5 years on this topic, and conclude with a discussion of what I think are some of the most important directions for future work in this area.
