What I do

My research interests include Human-Computer Interaction, Information Visualization and Data Analysis, User Experience Modeling, Reflective technologies, Interpretation systems, or Document and Knowledge Engineering. Application domains are related to education, culture, health, humanities… I focus on interdisciplinary approaches for the study of human-machine coupling and co-development and collaborate with people from sociology, psychology, ergonomy, anthropology, education science, philosophy, design, medecine, focusing on real world activities.

News (all)

Jul. 25: Publication of our main article on the Tecnis project. The paper is entitled Towards teleconsultations in the Metaverse - design and preliminary study of an immersive teleclinic for neuro-psychological assessment, it has been published in Frontiers in Virtual Reality. The Tecnis project was the occasion to explore what teleclinics in the Metaverse could be, where patients and practitioners would meet in social virtual reality and carry out health-related activities. With our interdisciplinary team, we focused on the particular case or neuropsychological testing, and designed a virtual immersive teleclinic where patients wait in a waiting room, are welcome by a neuropsychologist, then proceed to the consultation room where they can do desk-based cognitive tests in front of the practitioner, or standing tests with the practitioner at their side. The neuro-psychologist has a tablet both to control and monitor the tests, and to later debrief with the patient. Our evaluation show the clear value of the proposal as both types of users projected in the system. There was good usability and presence for patients, but clinicians expressed concerns about test validity and avatar quality. We continue our exploration of teleclinics in the Metaverse within the IPC4MH project on immersive prevention centers for junior and senior mental-health patients.

Apr. 25: Launch of the IPC4MH European project in Nantes!. Early April we finally launched the European IPC4MH (Immersive Prevention Centers for Mental Health) project. Our starting point is the realization that immersive technologies for diagnosis and remediation in mental health are now available, and that we need to make them more accessible to practitioners and patients by integrating them into immersive teleclinics. Our aim is to explore the extent to which it is possible and useful to offer such teleclinics in social virtual reality to participate in secondary and tertiary prevention in mental health. We will design pathways with patients and healthcare staff, then build several virtual centers enabling patients to carry out activities alone or with peers, meet carers, take part in support groups, etc., and conduct two evaluation campaigns with junior and senior audiences. This 36-month European project is funded under the THCS call for proposals (Transforming Health and Care Systems). It brings together academic (Nantes Université, HES-SO Valais-Wallis, Polska Akademia Nauk), industrial (C2Care, DiverSsiTy SA) and healthcare partners (CHU de Nantes, SOLIPSY, Consultation Libellule, Association Eliezer).

Aug. 24: Publication of our paper on comparing patient experiences in VR and Reality. Our paper with Jean-Philippe Rivière and Louis Vinet about the OPEVA project has been published in the International Journal of Human-Computer Studies. In this paper entitled Towards the use of VR prototypes in architecture to collect user experiences. An assessment of the comparability of patient experiences in a virtual and a real ambulatory pathway, we explore if the experiences lived by patients in an immersive VR simulation of an ophthalmology ambulatory pathway are comparable to those they live in the real pathways. We show that patients live comparable experiences along various experiential dimensions such as thought, emotion, sensation, social and sensory perceptions, and that VR prototypes may be adequate to assess issues with architectural design. This work was conducted at Clinique Jules Verne in Nantes.

Recent publications (all)

Yannick Prié, Toinon Vigier, Didier Acier, Hélène Bonneville, Manon Georges, Solène Thévenet, Samuel Bulteau. (2025) Towards Teleconsultations in the Metaverse: Design and Preliminary Study of an Immersive Teleclinic for Neuro-psychological Assessment in Frontiers in Virtual Reality - Virtual Reality in Medicine, to appear. doi Show abstract Virtual Reality and Metaverse technologies allow to design new telemedicine services such as teleconsultation that could take place within immersive teleclinics. Here we focus on distant neuro-psychological testing, an important topic both for diagnostic and monitoring of cognitive disabilities, notably allowing for distant longitudinal monitoring of patients. Our interdisciplinary team has designed a collaborative virtual reality tool for clinicians to carry out such immersive testing sessions. The patient first waits for the clinician in the waiting room, and the actual session is then a mix of discussion, desk-based, and independent test activities. Tests are accompanied and monitored by the clinician with various dashboards based on collected data. In this article we present our approach for immersive teleclinics, the design process of our social VR application, and our main choices. We detail the various environments and activities we have built, and present the results of a first evaluation on usability (with SUS), presence (MPS) and acceptability (UTAUTQ)} for healhty participants (pseudo-patients) and practitioners. We also discuss the more general lessons we have learned for the design of immersive teleclinics.

Antoine Widmer, Samuel Bulteau, Roman Malo, Paul Matusz, Noah Richert, Jean-Philippe Rivière, Przemysław Tomalski, Yannick Prié. (2025) Immersive Prevention Centers for Mental Health: Secondary and Tertiary Prevention in the Metaverse in II EMRN Conference - Exploring the Intersection of AI and the Metaverse, Alicante, 11-13 June 2025 Show abstract Mental health systems across Europe face persistent challenges in accessibility, resource limitations, and stigma. Vulnerable populations such as adolescents with neurodevelopmental disorders and older adults at risk of depression often fall through the cracks of existing care structures. The IPC4MH (Immersive Prevention Centers for Mental Health) project proposes an innovative solution: immersive prevention centers built within the Metaverse, designed for secondary and tertiary mental health prevention. Through interdisciplinary collaboration, the project aims to co-design, implement, and evaluate scalable, engaging, and inclusive virtual environments that support early intervention and long-term mental health care. This paper presents the conceptual foundation, objectives, research direction, and methodological approach of IPC4MH.

Majd Bitar, Jean-Philippe Rivière, Rebecca Fribourg, Jean-Marie Normand, Yannick Prié. (2025) Ethnography in the Metaverse in II EMRN Conference - Exploring the Intersection of AI and the Metaverse, Alicante, 11-13 June 2025 Show abstract As Metaverse platforms evolve, they offer new opportunities to study social behavior. We explore some aspects of conducting ethnographic studies in the Metaverse, highlighting both potential and limitations, while proposing key considerations for future research.

Mel Slater, Michele Di Dalmazi, Doron Friedman, Jessica Galissaire, Henri Isaac, Anna Kobusinska, Jean-François Lucas, Omar Niamut, Xueni Pan, Yannick Prié, Matthias Quent, Raúl Ruiz Rodríguez, Maria Sanchez-Vives, Piotr Skrzypczynski, Anthony Steed, Petter Wannerberg. (2025) A Multidisciplinary Approach to Understanding the Technology, Opportunities, Challenges, and Implications for Society of the Metaverse in in Frontiers in Virtual Reality - Virtual Reality and Human Behaviour, to appear Show abstract Since late 2021 there has been increasing interest in the idea of the ‘metaverse’. This is a virtual, augmented or mixed reality system that potentially millions of people can simultaneously inhabit, and where people can interact with one another in real-time, irrespective of the physical distance between them. It is heralded by some as the next level ‘world wide web’, that will use a 3D immersive interface, with the potential to mix virtual and physical reality, with environments persistent over time, and interoperable between different platforms and devices. Yet today there is no true example of a metaverse, only a number of nascent examples. Here we discuss the technical foundations for such metaverses, the role of generative AI, possible impact on society -including education, healthcare and the quality of life, business and consumers, the future of work, and its implications for democracy. We also discuss public perceptions of the metaverse, issues of governance and regulation, and its legal implications. Overall, while the metaverse may radically and positively alter the way that we live, we must take into account ethical and regulatory issues, in order to avoid predictions of a dystopian future being realized. This paper is, therefore, a multi-disciplinary introduction to the metaverse concept that may be useful to readers with many different types of interest.