News

Knowledge Spaces in Virtual Reality: Intuitive Interfacing with a
Multiperspective Hypermedia Environment

1 PhD Position

Call for Applications (deadline: 05. June 2017)


The Eberhard Karls Universität Tübingen in conjunction with the
Leibniz-Institut für Wissensmedien offers
1 PhD Position (E13 TV-L, 65%)
with a duration of three years starting on the 1st of July 2017. 

The position is offered in the framework of the
Leibniz-WissenschaftsCampus: Cognitive Interfaces – a research network
that was jointly initiated by the Leibniz-Institut für Wissensmedien
(IWM) and the Eberhard Karls Universität Tübingen. The framework focuses
on knowledge acquisition and education with the help of digital media,
fostering interdisciplinary research. Funding comes from the state of
Baden-Württemberg, the University of Tübingen, the Leibniz Association,
and the IWM, which is a member of the Leibniz Association.

The particular position focuses on the topic: “Knowledge Spaces in
Virtual Reality: Intuitive Interfacing with a Multiperspective
Hypermedia Environment”, wherein complex relational knowledge will be
presented in a 3D Virtual Environment (Unity® Software) with which the
user will be able to interact by means of state of the art motion
tracking techniques.

The main focus of your work will be to co-develop the virtual 3D
environment. This involves programming in C# (directly in Unity®
Software), as well as the setup of motion capturing systems, or other
controller-based input systems. You will also conduct user studies about
the utility of the interfaces and of particular user interactions in the
light of the resulting (particularly relational) knowledge acquisition
within the virtual knowledge spaces.

Your profile:

A master degree in cognitive science, psychology, media informatics, or
related disciplines is a mandatory prerequisite as well as sufficiently
solid programming experience, ideally including experience with Unity
3D. Moreover, experience with conducting user studies, particularly
experimental psychological studies, is highly desirable.

Our offer:

You will join an interdisciplinary team of researchers, which includes
the Cognitive Modeling team of Prof. Martin Butz at the University of
Tübingen as well as the Multimodal Interaction team of Prof. Peter
Gerjets at the IWM. Thus, you will have support from experts in VR and
particularly Unity 3D as well as from the experimental psychology side
and you will be part of a team that also works with artificial neural
networks and that has the main ambition to unravel how the mind comes
into being.

For further semantic information, please contact Prof. Martin Butz via
Email: martin.butz@uni-tuebingen.de <mailto:martin.butz@uni-tuebingen.de>.

Application details:

Applications (in English) including informative documents, a cover
letter, signed CV, copies of earned university degrees and transcripts
of individual grades, the names and email addresses of at least two
potential referees (university professors) as well as, optionally, a
letter of recommendation, are to be sent in digital form (one pdf
document) with the reference number WCT02-2017 by June 05, 2017 via
Email to personal@iwm-tuebingen.de <mailto:personal@iwm-tuebingen.de>.

The University seeks to raise the number of women in research and
teaching and therefore urges qualified women academics to apply for
these positions. Equally qualified applicants with disabilities will be
given preference. The employment will be carried out by the central
administration of the University of Tübingen.