In this session, I will highlight how our brain scaffolds our perception of the world around us, with a particular focus on how our experience of objects' properties can be readily manipulated. I'll describe my research on weight illusions, including recent work I have undertaken using immersive virtual reality to make objects feel heavier or lighter than they actually are.

Finally, I'll lay out a roadmap for how it is a better understanding of human perception, rather than advances in computing hardware, which will be key to the next generation of immersive technologies.

Session takeaways

Bonus pic!

One I'd not seen before - an extremely strong motion illusion pic.twitter.com/vOm6ZTjh8k

— Gavin Buckingham (@DrGBuckingham) August 22, 2019

Bio

I received my PhD in psychology from the University of Aberdeen in 2008, after which time I moved to Canada to work as a postdoctoral fellow at the Brain and Mind Institute at Western University. During this time, I began to study human visual and haptic perception, with a particular focus on our experience of how heavy things feel when we interact with them.

I moved to the University of Exeter in 2016, and am currently a senior lecturer in the Department of Sport and Health Sciences.