Bradley Davis

I’m a lecturer in Immersive Technology, focusing specifically on how we can best use immersive devices. My original background is in Computer Science where at University, I had the opportunity to experiment with virtual reality hardware. After my first trial with the equipment, I was hooked and looked for any opportunity to further the use of immersive devices. For my undergraduate project, I investigated using immersive tech in education where the idea of remote lectures had been proposed. These lectures were to be attended via a virtual reality headset allowing the student to be telepresent in the room. I argued that a student would still need to be able to take notes in these situations and created the Forearm Keyboard. The Forearm Keyboard combined a number of immersive tracking technologies to present a virtual keyboard on the user’s arm. The user could then interact with this keyboard with their other hand allowing for swift and familiar textual input. For this work, I was presented with the Dean’s Award for Best Final Year Project. I then started work on validating the assumptions that have been made in using stereoscopic displays. While numerous works suggest that immersive devices improve performance in a wide array of tasks, few seek to explain why that is. As part of my doctoral research (in progress), I aim to answer some of those questions.