Tim van Leeuwen, Master's Student
Hometown: Delft, The Netherlands
Affiliation: MPI for Biological Cybernetics, Department for Human Perception, Cognition and Action
What are you working on?
We are working on
making flight simulation or car driving simulation more realistic
by moving people around as they drive or fly. This is a challenge
since an aircraft has endless motion freedom (the sky is the limit,
literally) whereas a simulator can move only a few meters.
How are you going to find out?
We let people experience a simulator drive using different settings
and ask them what feels best. Varying the settings of the simulator
allows us to comment on the effect of changes to the set-up.
What's the most amazing thing you have found out
so far?
It appears that feeling a lot of good motion and a little bad
motion is worse than not feeling any motion at all, so all good
work is quickly undone by one small error! Avoiding errors hence
might be more important than copying the truth as best as possible,
theres quite some opportunity to trick people.
Why did you decide to come to
Tübingen?
My Aerospace Engineering education
at the Delft University of Technology requires me to do an
internship (preferably abroad), and the opportunity offered to me
to do research at a Max Planck Institute was too good to turn
down!
