Holger Regenbrecht
holger.regenbrecht(at)otago.ac.nz +64 3 479 8322
Dr. Holger Regenbrecht is a Full Professor at the University of Otago and leads together with Tobias the HCI group. Holger has been working in the fields of Virtual and Augmented Reality for over 15 years. He was initiator and manager of the Virtual Reality Laboratory at Bauhaus University Weimar (Germany) and the Mixed Reality Laboratory at DaimlerChrysler Research and Technology (Ulm, Germany).
His research interests include Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), Applied Computer Science and Information Technology, (collaborative) Augmented reality, 3D Teleconferencing, psychological aspects of Mixed Reality, three-dimensional user interfaces (3DU) and computer-aided therapy and rehabilitation.
Holger was several times among the finalists of the supervisor of the year award (2011, 2012, 2015, 2018) and won twice the supervisor of the year award as best supervisor in the division (2013 and 2014). Holger's research is among others supported by a National Science Challenge SfTI grant and he is a collaborator on an MBIE smart ideas grant.
He is a member of IEEE, ACM, and igroup.org and serves as a reviewer and auditor for several conferences, journals and institutions.
Google Scholar Holger's private igroup page Holger's department pageTobias Langlotz
tobias.langlotz(at)otago.ac.nz +64 3 479 8096
Dr. Tobias Langlotz is a Full Professor at the University of Otago and co-leads the HCI group. Tobias' primary research interests are in Human-Computer Interaction, Wearable and Ubiquitous Computing, often evolving around using Augmented Reality and other techniques from Visual Computing. At the moment, Tobias is interested mainly in Computational Glasses and Vision Augmentations and their potential for compensating vision impairments or enhancing human perception. He is also working on nomadic, highly mobile and wearable telepresence solutions that allow people to share their environment with remote users. Here, he is particularly interested in new forms of tourism using virtual and augmented reality technologies. Finally, Tobias is interested in challenges and technologies for continuous use of Augmented Reality technology (Pervasive Augmented Reality). Previous to his current research work, he worked in the field of Mobile and Handheld Augmented Reality, Spatial Augmented Reality and Holographic displays. His research methodology is both bottom-up (build and evaluating technology and interfaces) and top-down (application-driven). Tobias is an active member of the international research community and, among other service roles, served as General chair for IEEE VR 2022 (Christchurch/Online) and IEEE VR 2023 (Shanghai).
Tobias won an "Early Career Award for Distinction in Research" from the University of Otago in 2017 and was a finalist for the Supervisor of the Year award in 2016. Tobias is currently the Science Leader of an MBIE Endeavour Research program but his research is also supported by two Marsden grants, a National Science Challenge SfTI seed grant, a Royal Society Catalyst seed grant, and he is a collaborator on an MBIE smart ideas grant. His work has further been supported by Snap Inc., Qualcomm, Lumus, Internet NZ, and Nokia.
He is deputy director of the ARIVE network (Australasian Researchers in Interactive Virtual Environments), is a member of IEEE, and ACM, and serves as a reviewer and auditor for the leading venues in HCI/AR/VR.
Google Scholar Twitter LinkedIn Tobias' department page ARIVE networkResearchers
Jacob is a PostDoctoral Research Fellow working with us on Virtual Tourism as part of the MBIE funded research project "He karapitipitinga mariko – Immersive regenerative tourism experiences in Aotearoa". Jacob's interest lie within XR supported collaboration and telepresence for tourism and education. He received his PhD from the University of Otago before becoming a PostDoctoral Fellow at the Victoria University of Wellington.
Kushani is a PhD student working on ethical issues in Pervasive (continious and omnipresent augmentation). She is in particular interested in issues that arise from difference in information access and display in Augmented Reality. Her PhD is supervised by Holger and Tobias.
Junlei is a PhD student working on visual attention and visual noise management through wearable devices. Outside of the lab Junlei is enjoying diving along the Otago coastline and playing basketball. Before coming to Otago, Junlei was studying at the Australian National University and Harbin Institute of Technology. His PhD is supervised by Tobias and Holger.
Kerian is a research assistant who is working on the Atea project in particular the capture and playback of visual and auditory experiences.
Chris is a PhD student focusing on stroke rehabilitation using mixed reality with head mounted displays. Previously, his Master's work focused on developing a new interface to physically explore medical volume data using a mobile tablet computer. During his Honors, he worked on predicting American Football games using different prediction models and comparing it against previous models from literature. His interests include sports (American football and soccer), movies, finance and traveling.
Laurie is a PhD student supervised by Steven Mills working alongside the lab on the Abundant Intelligences Indigenous AI project. His work focuses on developing tikanga for transitioning into Māori virtual reality spaces.
Mehran is a PhD student focused on the self-training system for learning causal sports. His project aims to provide a platform in Mixed Reality that helps individuals learn sports techniques independently, without the need for on-site coaches. He is interested in various types of sports for watching, playing, and conducting research.
Eden is a bachelor’s student working as a summer intern to develop a two-way independent streaming infrastructure for Virtual Tourism. Eden’s primary research lies in the field of Digital Humanities. He is particularly fascinated by the integration of AI and large language models (LLMs) in humanities research, such as using LLMs to analyse the intricate characters across the twenty volumes of Émile Zola’s 19th-century masterpiece, Les Rougon-Macquart. In 2024, he was honoured with L’Honneur d’Alliance Française de Dunedin for his outstanding achievements in French studies, awarded by Alliance Française.
Alban is a bachelor's student working as a summer intern to develop a method for livestreaming footage from a drone for remote tourism experiences.
Adjunct Members
Stefanie Zollmann is an Associate Professor in Visual Computing at the department of Computer Science. Stefanie has a strong background in visual computing for real-time sports visualisation and industrial Augmented Reality. Given the mutual research interests she often serves as a student co-supervisor and is a collaborator on several projects.
Yuta Itoh is an Project Associate Professor at the University of Tokyo and the Tokyo Institute for Technology (Tokyo Tech) and leads there the Augmented Vision Lab. Yuta is an international expert in human augmentation and his collaboration with our group is supported with a Catalyst Seed grant that allows joint work and longer time visits also including jointly supervised PhD students. If you are more interested in Yuta's work please visit Yuta's lab page.
Jonathan is a PostDoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Copenhagen, working with us on Computational Glasses and their application for enhancing human vision and compensate for vision impairments. He was already involved in several projects with the HCI lab as part of his PhD studies or as a research assistant including compensation of colour vision deficiency.
Steven Mills is an Associate Professor in Computer Vision and related problems at the department of Computer Science. Steven has worked on various Computer Vision challenges including Structure from Motion in challenging environments, image descriptors and matching of descriptors, and real-time tracking. Steven is involved in many of our projects requiring his specific skills and knowledge.
Alumni
Noel was a PhD student working with us on mixed voxel realities, specifically for supporting communication for indigenous cultures. His work involved streaming and visualising volumetric data captured by several Kinect depth cameras, and he was supervised by Holger, Steven and Tobias. Noel now works at Animation Research Limited where he is putting his graphics knowledge to good use.
Stu was a PhD student working on working on Voxel-based Mixed Realities supervised by Holger and Tobias. Before coming to Otago, Stu was working on industrial computer-vision problems but luckily the the good surf around Dunedin (and of course his research topic) brought him to our group to pursue a PhD.
Rosa began with us as a visiting researcher from the University of California in Santa Cruz, but quickly fell in love with New Zealand and worked with us as a research assistant for several years.
Tanh's PhD research focused on natural interaction within virtual environments with a focus on how these interactions, and the sensation of presence in general, should be measured.
Alex was a postdoctoral fellow within the HCI group and is now an Assistant Professor at Graz University of Technology. His research interests evolve around computer vision techniques for human-computer interaction. He is in particularly interested in exploring eye data, calibration of HMDs, and general Augmented Reality. Alex received his Masters degree from the Technical University in Munich, Germany, and a PhD from Osaka University, Japan. Before joining the HCI group he worked as a Assistant Professor at the Nara Institute of Science and Technology and as a visiting researcher at Carnegie Mellon University.
Benjamin was a research assistant and honours student supervised by Tobias. His research is on natural interaction for wearable computing and focuses in particular on a better understanding of pointing-based interfaces. If not in the lab, Benjamin is training hard for his next fight sparing or fight in kickboxing or Jiu Jitsu or Muay Thai and consequenly the whole lab is always very nice to him.
Matt was a research assistant working with Tobias on the topic of virtual tourism and large scale outdoor telepresence.
Matt was a research assistant and PhD student working with Tobias and Holger on the topic of telepresence and radiometric corrected HMDs.
Jacob Young was a PhD student working on mobile telepresence solutions. His PhD thesis is titled "Removing spatial boundaries in immersive mobile communications” where he prototypically developed novel mobile or wearable telepresence solutions that do required specifically prepared environments to work. Jacob is now back working in the lab as a Postdoctoral Fellow after a brief stint at Te Herenga Waka - Victoria University of Wellington.
Lewis was a PhD student co-supervised by Tobias together with Stefanie Zollmann, Jonathan Ventura (Calipoly) and Steven Mills. Lewis was working on exploring Augmented Reality to extend the experience of live sport events with a specific focus in tracking in challenging environments.
Elora was a research assistant in the lab and helped in setting up our motion capturing system while also working on 3D printed head-mounted displays. Elora received a Google Women Techmakers scholarship, Grace Hopper Fellowship.
Sam was a research assistant and honours student working with Holger on a platform for streamlining the sharing of volumetric videos.
Aaron was a summer intern and research assistant within the lab. Aaron worked with us on mobile prototypes for computational glasses and on the compensation of colour vision deficiency.
Jonny was a PhD student focusing on Embodied Learning using Virtual environments, and the impact a user's sense of presence has on one's ability to learn in such environments. As such he became an expert in learning in Virtual Environments while already being an expert in Unity and all kinds of VR hardware. Previously, his Master's work focused on a systematic inquiry into the problems associated with Head-mounted Display technologies with respect to the application of Mixed Reality. During his Honors, he implemented and evaluated an Augmented Reality implementation of a physical rehabilitation test. His interests are in politics, education, and the general well-being and progression of all. He also enjoys mountain biking, various sports, and musical art.
Oliver was a research assistant and summer intern working with us. After doing a special topic paper with us, Oliver started to work with us on investigating deep learning for computational glasses and voxel-based realities. Apart from working with us, thinking about his own companies, and securing the stadium, Oliver is also doing a double major in Information and Computer Science.
Alex received a summer research scholarship working with us on virtual hand illusions in Virtual Reality using Unity 3D, Leap Motion sensors, and Oculus Rift. Apart from this, Alex is working on her Information Science and Computer Science degree.
Jack was a research assistant who also did special topic papers with us. More recently he became an expert in programming the Microsoft Hololens when working on telepresence application within an industrial context. His work was supervised by Holger and Tobias.
Mohammed was a PhD student focusing on stress resilience training using Virtual Reality. He was supervised by Holger and Dr Nicola Swain from the Department of Psychological Medicine. Mohammed's interests include Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), Virtual Reality, Collaborative Virtual Environments, psychological/physiological reactions in Virtual Reality environments, and utilising Virtual Reality to improve people's mental health (i.e. diagnosis, training, and treatment).
Abdulaziz was a PhD student, supervised by Holger and Prof. David O'Hara from the Department of Psychology. His focus was on the conceptual development and prototypical implementation of a power wheelchair assessment/training system. Abdulaziz's interests include Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), Virtual Reality, Applied Computer Science and Information Technology. He is interested in all kind of sports activities, including, martial arts, mountain biking, and snowboarding. He also enjoys music, art and design.
Chontira was an Honours student working with us on virtual mirrors in Augmented Reality using MS Hololens, Kinect and Unity. Before starting on her Honours, Chontira graduated with a double major in Software engineering and Psychology.
Julia was a research assistant and summer intern working with us on a VR-based telepresence system implemented using the Unreal Engine. Her work was supervised by Tobias and Holger.
Katrin was a Intern/MSc Student visiting us from the University of Koblenz-Landau, Germany do work on her master thesis with us. Her master's thesis was supervised by Holger and Tobias. She was working on a Mixed Reality Embodiment Platform, with her focus being on adaptive scene realism in a volumetric collaborative mixed reality environment.
Arne was a Intern/MSc Student visiting us from the University of Koblenz-Landau, Germany do work on his master thesis with us. For his master's thesis he was working on a Mixed Reality Embodiment Platform and is supervised by Holger and Tobias. The focus of his work is on recording and replay of volumetric characters in a collaborative mixed reality environment.
Samuel ("Sam") worked with us as several projects as a summer student. He contributed in particular on our prototype for a wearable stroke rehabilitation system supervised by Holger and Tobias.
Jasons was a summer intern within the lab before also working on a smaller project in the lab as part of his course work. He worked in particular on video-see through AR displays and 3d body reconstruction where he was supervised by Holger and Tobias.
Jack was a Honours students with the HCI lab and was involved in several other smaller projects. He worked in particular on AR-based stroke rehabilitation systems where he was supervised by Holger and Simon.
Dr. Simon Hoermann was a Postdoctoral Research Fellow with the Departments of Medicine (DSM) and Information Science at the University of Otago. Simon was previously an Assistant Reserach Fellow with the Deparmtent of Information Science at the University of Otago where he also obtained his PhD under supervision of Holger.
Intern/MSc Student from Graz University of Technology with thesis work on situated media in outdoor environments supervised by Tobias
Intern/MSc Student from Graz University of Technology with thesis work on mobile videoconferencing supervised by Tobias.
Mike Goodwin was a Master student investigating mobile applications supporting the concept of Mindfulness. He was supervised by Holger
PhD thesis on Digital Channels in healthcare service delivery: A case study within the primary maternity setting; Holger as supervisor together with Alec Holt and Russel Butson (Higher Education Development Centre)
