Tim van Leeuwen, Master's Student

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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, there’s 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!

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