All news

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!

Dec. 23: PhD Defense of Roman Malo. Roman Malo successfully defended his doctoral thesis in psychology titled “Psychological Flexibility, Psychopathology, and Virtual Reality - From Subjective Measurement to the Possibility of Objective Measurement of Transdiagnostic Processes”. I had the pleasure of co-supervising this thesis with Didier Acier (Psychology) and Samuel Bulteau (Psychiatry). Roman is particularly interested in the possibility of using ecological tasks (corresponding to real-life situations) in virtual reality to study how participants navigate problematic situations while demonstrating psychological flexibility. He employs both observational data and micro-phenomenological interviews to closely follow the specific experiences of his participants. This mixed approach has highlighted that “anxious” participants do not react in the same way as “healthy” participants, and their experiences differ, paving the way for a renewed understanding of flexibility.

Jun. 23: CARE IMX Workshop. Our Workshop on the “Future Immersive Healthcare Experience in Medical and Home Settings” was held successfully during the ACM IMX Conference in Nantes. We had a keynote by Mel Slater on “Virtual Reality in Mental Health – A Self-Counselling Approach”, 5 papers, and a panel on the topic “What will be healthcare with immersive technologies in 2033?” with Dr. Eric Malbos (Psychiatry), Pierre Gadea (C2CARE – VR software for healthcare), and Pr Mel Slater. More information on the workshop site

Jan. 23: Use of Virtual Reality for Evaluating Cognitive Functions for Diagnosis in Psychiatry and Clinical Psychology. Toinon Vigier and I were invited at the one week Phiteco (Philosophy Technology Cognition) seminar for a presentation of our work in psychotherapy and virtual reality. The seminar was recorded (in french)

Nov. 22: Workshop - Patient Experience and Experiential Knowledge -. The PEEL (Patient Experience Evaluation Lab) that I co-lead organized a one day workshop on patient experience and experiential knowledge, with 3 keynotes speakers, 2 panels, and the presentations of several projects we carry in Nantes. Everything was recorded and is available on YouTube available on YouTube (in french)

Dec. 20: PhD Thesis Defense on Progressive Analytics. Vincent Raveneau has successfully defended his thesis on Progressive Pattern mining, the source code of the tool he built is available as open source. A dedicated webpage is available with all the information (manuscript, slides, source code, etc.

Nov. 20: Postdoc in France (18 months) - Executive Function testing in Virtual Reality. Within an ongoing collaboration between and Nantes Universities, Hanyang and Nantes University Hospitals, on the use of VR environments for the testing of executive functions in VR, the candidate will design and develop a new integrated VR environment, design an experimental protocol that will be run both in France and Korea. (more info)

Nov. 19: Postdoc position in Immersive Analytics (6-7 months from Jan. 202O). The candidate will extend the work we have been carrying on how to visualize and interact with 3D scatterplots in Virtual Reality. His/her first task is to develop an experiment that aims to compare two types of data immersion. Other tasks and research directions will depend on personal interest of the candidate. (more info)

Sep. 19: beginning of our Master’s Degree in Digital Cultures. The interdisciplinary program on Digital Cultures has been launched in sept. 2019 in University of Nantes, in a brand new building at the center of the creative district. Seven students from various interdisciplinary backgrounds will follow courses on Computer science, Human-Computer Interaction, Data analysis, UX Design, Psychology, Sociology, Philosophy, Semiotics, Ecomonics, and Information systems, and learn by doing in numerous projects.

Jul. 19: Publication of our Survey of Immersive Analytics in IEEE Transactions on Computer Graphics and Visualization. This exhaustive survey paper (PDF) reviews around 80 systems presented in 127 scientific papers between 1991 and the end 2018. A companion website features more detailed descriptions of all the systems, and new ones can be contributed.

Jul. 19: Two international fundings have been obtained to work with Hanyang University in Seoul on executive functions testing in VR. We obtained a franco-korean Projet Hubert Curien (PHC) STAR funding for some researchers exchanges between Nantes and Hanyang University. In addition, a IITP project was obtained by our Korean partners to send several students work with us in Nantes on those topics.

Jan. 19: Official announcement of the opening of our Master’s Degree in Digital Cultures. The interdisciplinary program on Digital Cultures we have been working on for several years will open in sept. 2019 in University of Nantes, in a brand new building at the center of the creative district. Official announcement and program (in french)

Aug. 18: New website!. A brand new website is available. It is based on Jekill, should be readable on any device, has some dynamic flavor. It is the result of an effort to present my various interdisciplinary research activities in a hopefully more comprehensive way than the previous site (still available here).

Aug. 18: Enaction schools websites. Between 2006 and 2009 four summer schools on “Enaction and Cognitive Science” have been organized. The archive of their websites, with a lot of documents, is available here.

Jul. 18: Postdoc position in Experience modelling (french). We will have a french-speaking Postdoc position related to the HOMERIC project, starting in 2018, on qualitative / quantitative analysis and modelling of user experience in VR. (more info)

Jun. 18: Revistim-X experiments have launched. Revistim-X experiments have finally begun! We will have 28 subjects until the end of July. There’s an article (fr) in a local newspaper.

May. 17: PhD position in Immersive Analytics. Design/HCI/Dataviz PhD fellowship available Representing and interacting with symbolic data within immersive environments (more info)

May. 17: Postdoc position in Learning analytics. A postdoc position is available for the eFIL project aimed at tablet-based active learning in classroom. The main goal is to analyse the traces and design and test dashboards for teachers. (more info)

Apr. 17: Launch of Revistim-X project. Beginning of the Revistim-X project (VR and rTMS, an experiential approach) with psychologists and psychotherapists.

Apr. 17: ECBridge project has been accepted. EC-Bridge has been selected by the FUI23 call: we will do trace-based recommendation for museography.

Feb. 17: Dagstuhl Seminar. Participating to Dagstughl Seminar “Beyond VR and AR: Reimagining Experience Sharing and Skill Transfer Towards an Internet of Abilities”

Jan. 17: New laboratory. LINA and IRCCyN give birth to a new lab: LS2N (Laboratoire des Sciences du Numérique de Nantes) UMR CNRS 6004

Older news

(oct 2016) The Nantes Nantes Dataviz Meetup is officially launched (with Grégoire Cliquet and Vincent Tourré).

(jul 2015) Vincent Raveneau has obtained a grant to begin his PhD thesis on “Instantaneous interactive mining of activity data” next october (with Julien Blanchard and myself).

(may 2015) Our paper Reflection-in-Action Markers for Reflection-on-Action in Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning Settings with Elise Lavoué, Gaëlle Molinari, and Safè Khezami has been accepted for publication by Computers & Education.

(april 2015) HCI/Data visualisation postdoc position available Visualizing image construction in astrophysics (EPISTEME project).

(july 2014) I will participate in 3 ANR projects accepted on the 2014 generic call: EPISTEME on Digital Studies, HUBBLE on Learning Analytics, CIRESFI on Digital Humanities.<

(july 2014) Meta-education project is officially alive after 2 years of coma, I will work mainly with Elise Lavoué (LIRIS) on CSCL studies.

(jun 2014) Diplôme Universitaire DU DESSiiN (DESign de Services Interactifs INnovants Objets communicants & Interfaces tangibles) will launch in september. This short curriculum aims to help engineers and designers discover interdisciplinary synergy around a common project.

(sept 2013) COCo (Comin OpenCourseware) project has been launched for 3 years, its aim is to build an experimental platform for Open Educational Ressources construction, diffusion and collaborative use.

(april 2013) A position of pedagogical support and open course projects management will be opened in september at University of Nantes (one year, renewable).

(april 2013) Looking for a PhD candidate for an industrial PhD thesis in the cultural domain, related to mining and interactive visualisation.

(jan 2013) Sujet de thèse disponible au LIRIS dans le cadre du projet Meta-Education Construction collaborative de documents hypermédias dans les ENT : modèles, outils et pratiques.

(sept 2012) Arrival in Nantes (LINA / Polytech).

(july 2012) Several projects have been accepted: JANUS (Labex IMU), Co-adaptation (IXXI) and Spectacle en ligne(s) (ANR Corpus).

(june 2012) Our paper “CHM: an Annotation- and Component-based Hypervideo Model for the Web” with Madjid Sadallah and Olivier Aubert has been accepted for publication by Multimedia Tools and Applications (already online).

(june 2012) This is official, next year I will be full professor at University of Nantes (LINA laboratory).

(june 2012) Paper accepted at EKAW 2012 with Olivier Curé and Pierre-Antoine Champin.

(march 2012) DIS 2012 paper has been accepted. Master ‘Information Architecture" (Architecture de l’information) has been accepted, Beginning of project eGonomy, due to a lack of candidates, the postdoc position will now open in septembre 2012: Trace-based histories for navigating in image databases.

(feb 2012) Beginning of projects CLAIRE and QueJant.

(jan 2012) The eGonomy project has been officially accepted, we have a postdoc position for march on Trace-based histories for navigating in image databases.

(dec 2012) DATADATA à la Gaité Lyrique le 27 janvier 2012.

(nov 2011) My Habilitation à Diriger des Recherches</a> has been defended the 18th of november 2011.