Work

I lead two projects and consequently a small team of researchers in the field of mobile and mixed reality interaction (The PI of both projects is Prof. Dr. Thomas Engel). Our focus is on improving people’s lives through these technologies either by reducing traffic congestion or through using serious games to encourage greater participation in culture. Technology should always have a benefit and not just sit in a lab.

I regularly give talks on presence, mixed realities and in-car systems. Therefore if you are interested in my work topics and want to chat some more or to ask about me giving a talk please visit the contact page.

Current Location

I am currently based at the University of Luxembourg’s SnT research centre where I work extensively with a number of colleagues including Dr. Vincent Koenig, Prof. Dr. Thomas Engel and Prof. Dr. Romain Martin. In addition I am also the vice-chair of Working Group 14.5 – Social and Ethical Issues in Entertainment Computing for the International Federation for Information Processing.

Topics

My main area of work relates to human-computer interaction within mixed realities and location-aware systems. Indeed my interest in such areas extends back to my undergraduate and masters degree with the result that since 1996 I have been studying or working closely on technologies associated with then virtual reality but more recently augmented reality. The basic overall topics which I tend to explore are:

Presence: your feel of being in another place other than grounded reality, or a feeling of being with others..
Place: your overall physical and higher-level model of the location you are visiting.
Interaction across devices and modalities including eye trackers, multi-touch systems and mobile devices
Usability of in-car, mobile, mixed reality and multi-touch systems

With these topics in mind I have conducted extensive studies of and sometimes participated in the actual development of the following types of system:

Virtual environments for crisis management, e.g. burning oil rigs and sinking ships as well as photo-realitic virtual environments
Augmented reality gaming, such as the TimeWarp Cologne system that was developed at Fraunhofer FIT
Location-aware systems for games and story telling
In-car systems that are designed to persuade drivers to undertake other courses of action
Video-to-video interaction for city based experiences
Website and systems usability

In the past I also worked as a usability consultant and was involved in evaluating websites for major companies such as Legal and General Insurance and various start-ups. Additionally for a number of years I was a press officer for Runtime Revolution Ltd (publisher of LiveCode) during which time we enjoyed major press coverage across the world and several award nominations including winning a MacWorld US Eddy.

Education

PhD Napier University
MSc (Advanced) De Montfort University
BSc (hons) University of Dundee

Employment – a very brief overview

I have held a variety of positions from Senior Research Fellow at Napier University through to Deputy Head of the Collaborative, Augmented and Virtual Environments Department at Fraunhofer FIT. Other posts have included a guest research position and working for Runtime Revolution the publisher of LiveCode. These days I am based at The University of Luxembourg. In the past I also carried out usability consultancy for a large London based Website developer for clients such as Legal and General (a major UK insurer).

I am a regular reviewer or member of the programme committee for a number of conferences and journals including: Journal of Personal and Ubiquitous Computing, Interacting with Computers, Presence Tele-operators and Virtual Environments and conferences such as Presence, CHI and British HCI.

You can find my extended work information at: www.securityandtrust.lu

Rod McCall

In-car systems, games and human-computer interaction

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