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)

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.

Apr. 24: Publication of our paper on Affordances research. We published a paper we had ben working on for a long time with Roman Malo. The paper is entitled Reaching conceptual stability by re-articulating empirical and theoretical work on affordances and has been published in Frontiers in Psychology. In this paper we claim that affordances lack conceptual clarity, that only empirical work can help settle on important theoretical questions, but also that theoretical and empirical research on affordances are disarticulated. Thus is because empirical work does not take into account current theoretical propositions and theoretical researchers do not seem interested in empirical verifications of their proposals. Yet the concept of affordance remains important for 4E cognition development, as well as a boundary objects for many other research fields. We then claim that it is important to re-articulate theoretical and empirical work, notably by fostering empirical studies, and we propose a set of requirement and a framework to develop adequate empirical methodologies.

Apr. 24: Presentation at the EMRN Conference. I presented a paper entitled “Towards immersive teleclinics in the Metaverse, the case of neuropsychological consultation” at the European Metaverse Research Network conference in Barcelona. The paper is co-authored with Toinon Vigier Didier Acier Samuel Bulteau and Solene Thevenet. It presents our work on the TECNIS (Téléclinique Immersive) project between Nantes Université and CHU de Nantes where we explore how social VR could be used for teleconsultation between a clinician and a patient, here in the case of neuropsychological testing. We decided that the practitioner should lead the session, that there should be two types of tests (desk-based and in independant environments), and we even developed a waiting room for the patient to wait for the doctor. The evaluation of the system is currently carried out, focusing on acceptability for patients and clinicians. This work participates to defining how we can leverage the Metaverse for future health. We are looking for collaboration for the next steps!

Recent publications (all)

Victor Duvivier, Matthieu Perreira Da Silva, Yannick Prié. (2025) A conceptual framework for immersive behavioral data exploration assisted by a deep learned representation of data in IEEE AIxVR 2025 — 7th IEEE International Conference on Artificial Intelligence & eXtended and Virtual Reality, Jan 2025, Lisboa, Portugal, 5pp. Show abstract By allowing to conduct experiments involving ecologically valid tasks within controlled environments, Virtual Reality (VR) offers novel opportunities for studying human behavior. Several modalities can be leveraged, including event logs, motion trajectories, eye-tracking data, or physiological signals. However, analyzing such multimodal data presents considerable challenges due to their inherent complexity, the varied structures they imply, as well as the necessity to use exploratory approaches. There is therefore a need to design visual analytics tools for the exploration of immersive behavioral data without prior knowledge. Our idea is to integrate deep learned computational models —which leverage advanced techniques to extract valuable high-level features from unlabeled data— into exploratory Visual Analytics tools. We introduce a conceptual framework for integrating deep learning models into the Visual Analytics process of immersive behavioral data analysis, also focusing on the services that such systems should provide to the analysts.

Jean-Philippe Rivière, Louis Vinet, Yannick Prié. (2024) Towards the use of virtual reality prototypes in architecture to collect user experiences: An assessment of the comparability of patient experiences in a virtual and a real ambulatory pathway in International Journal of Human-Computer Studies, Volume 192, December 2024, 103342. doi Show abstract Virtual Reality (VR) enables the low-cost production of realistic prototypes of buildings at early stages of architectural projects. Such prototypes may be used to gather the experiences of future users and iterate early on the design. However, it is essential to evaluate whether what is experienced within such VR prototypes corresponds to what will be experienced in re- ality. Here, we use an innovative method to compare the experiences of patients in a real building and in a virtual environment that plays the role of a prototype that could have been created by architects during design phase. We first designed and implemented a VR environment replicating an existing ambulatory pathway. Then, we used micro-phenomenological interviews to collect the experiences of real patients in the VR environment (n=8), along with VR traces and first-person videos and in the real ambulatory pathway (n=8). We modeled and normalized the experiences, and compared them systematically. Results suggest that patients live comparable experiences along various dimensions of experience such as thought, emotion, sensation, social and sensory perceptions, and that VR prototypes may be adequate to assess issues with architectural design. This work opens unique perspectives towards involving patients in User-Centered Design in architecture, though challenges lie ahead on how to design VR prototypes from early blueprints of architects.

Roman Malo, Yannick Prié. (2024) Reaching conceptual stability by re-articulating empirical and theoretical work on affordances in in Frontiers in Psychology 15:1283168. doi Show abstract Theoretical developments on affordances have proliferated, resulting in a lack of conceptual stability and a potential compromise in scientific validity. However, affordances should not be discarded, given their centrality in post-cognitive theories and their widespread reuse across various research domains. Empirical research on affordances remains sparse, out of sync with theoretical advancements, and thus unable to contribute effectively to scientific progress due to its disarticulation with theoretical work. That is why re-articulating theoretical and empirical investigations on affordances is needed to pave a more fruitful path for the concept’s advancement. To accomplish this objective, emphasis must be placed on empirical research, leveraging recent theoretical propositions and devising corresponding empirical methodologies. The proposed requirements and framework represent a step in this endeavor.

Toinon Vigier, Didier Acier, Samuel Bulteau, Solène Thevenet, Yannick Prié. (2024) Towards immersive teleclinics in the Metaverse: the case of neuropsychological consultation in European Metaverse Research Network: A Metaverse for the Good, Barcelona, Spain, 8-9 april, 6 pp. Show abstract The Metaverse is often deemed very important for the future of medicine and healthcare, yet there exist very few real health applications making use of social VR, its core feature. Here we first present our vision of what could be a virtual clinic in the Metaverse that would allow patients and practitioners to meet in VR and carry out various activities. We then introduce Tecnis, our implementation of such a clinic for psychotherapeutic consultation and neuropsychological testing. Our system features several spaces such as a waiting room, a consultation room, and standalone activities, as well as data-based dashboads for clinicians to lead the sessions.