Lab Update

I am presently preparing the visit of Sergey Kapishnikov (from the Weizmann Institute of Science, Rehovot, Israel), who will be visiting my lab in May. He will give a talk on new way to do high-resolution bio-imagery using X-rays ... something which could have some amazing potential in studying vestibular system. Exam period is coming soon, so my hard-working undergraduate students are focusing on their courses now, but when exams will be done, we are going to have a lot of interesting results, since both Marie-Ève and Charlotte's projects are advancing in very promising ways ! Talking about students' work, we submitted last week another paper with Catherine ... so, things are advancing !

Lab Update

Long time I did not post something ... Well, a lot of things going on around, not enough time to write ! The first months of this year have been very intense, but good things are coming. On future developments of the lab : we are again having human subjects on a very interesting series of collaborative works with the newly established lab of Pascale Tremblay (Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Medicine of Laval University), we are developing new projects on mutli-modal and/or sensory integration in virtual spaces (some preliminary data already, extending our themes from avatars in virtual worlds to other cyberspaces such as the blogosphere and to web-forums, we will have a presentation on that next month with Lynn Koller (from Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University) in the PCA/ACA annual meeting in Boston). We did last week our first joined group meeting with the lab of Philip Jackson (School of Psychology, Laval University) ... that went pretty well actually, such things will reinforce the "avatar group" of Laval University.

I am pretty happy with my present team, but since we are asking more money, and having much more ideas to test, we have positions opened for promising students !

Lab Update

To begin the new year, some good news for us.

First, welcome to two new lab members, Marie-Ève Arsenault and Charlotte Kemp. Welcome aboard !

Second, today two of our papers got published in the last issue of Computers in Human Behavior : the paper of Anna on spatial distribution of avatars in virtual spaces, using Second Life as a model (Lomanowska AM, Guitton MJ (2012) Spatial proximity to others determines how humans inhabit virtual worlds. Computers in Human Behavior, 28 : 318-323. [PDF]); and the paper on the impact of meta-media on immersive behavior, also using Second Life as a model, but analyzing the interactions between a meta-media (a media over a media, in this case a blog relating the events taking place in the virtual community of Star Wars Role-Play, all "in character", "GNN" (Galactic News Network) ... an amazing work of two avatars by the way, Daana Kira and Rakiko Lowtide) and the virtual world on which the meta-media is based (i.e., in this case the Second Life Star Wars Role-Play community) (Guitton MJ (2012) The immersive impact of meta-media in a virtual world. Computers in Human Behavior, 28 : 450-455. [PDF]).

With the new year, some new resolutions ! So, for all students (anywhere in the world, not specific to my lab) and for researchers alike, we should read more papers. To help you in that, my two Twitter account are here ! First, my main Twitter account :

There, I post very regularly links to papers, small comments, and so on ... Honestly, a "must follow" I think ... objectively, really ! Most papers suggested there will deal with virtual reality, augmented reality, social media, bionics, or papers of general interest ... But need to check regularly, I do update the "things to read" rather often.

Second, my second Twitter account, which is in French and supposed to be a support for the courses I teach. So, it is a bit more specific, but still. At the beginning of each post, there is the code of the course (Laval University codes, it is where I teach mostly). Some links are worth a look, for instance the one I suggest for the course NRB-7008 (Neuroscience II) on the auditory system.

Most of the posts however refer to the courses I teach to the ORL Residents (with the code ORL-X). Among those posts, I do some "suggesting reading", which are (obviously) aimed and centered around oto-rhino-laryngology. However, I think the suggested papers could be of interest for other as well. So, possible to have a look there too :

And once again, a Happy New Year 2012 !

Happy New Year 2012 !

Almost the end of the year ... and the beginning of next one ! One year that this blog is active, and so far, I think it is a good experience, even if I was publishing less and less materials, especially since I began to use Twitter. Anyway, this past year has been very fruitful, a lot of good things came out, a lot of ideas, some new amazing collaborations, a lot of promises for the future ... and this coming years is beginning with excellent signs:  new lab members, several papers and book chapters in press, several paper in writing process, a lot of new ideas to test ...

In the coming months, I will be writing few posts here on the general design thematic. It seems I am having a growing interest in that topic, after the last year conference on Design Principles and Practices in Rome (related paper [PDF]), and after my visit at the Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Daytona Beach. But this interest was coming from earlier on, definitively. So, some posts in the coming future will be on video games design, and particularly on how our work can be useful for that ([PDF], [PDF], [PDF], [PDF], [PDF]); and some will be on clinical design, including, but not limited to, drug design ([PDF]) and general clinical strategies with special emphasis on tele-medicine.

But for now, let's enjoy the last days of the year,

I wish you all a Happy New Year 2012 !

Research Update

Several of our works on virtual spaces are going on their way. The paper on distribution of avatars in space is now available online (In Press, still, but should be in the next issue of Computers in Human Behavior), and I got today the proofs of the paper on the impact of meta-media on virtual communities. Looking very good ! Using as a model the Star Wars Role-Play community of Second Life, this paper analysed the impact of "Galactic News Network", a news-styled blog relating the events taking place in the SWRP community of Second Life in a "in character" immersive way, on the community itself, using as a theoretical framework the 3C model I presented in previous work. Interestingly, the typological analysis of what I described in this paper really reinforce the model I think. Big thanks for Daana Kira and Rakiko Lowtide, the two main "Reporters" of GNN, without whom I would not have been able to do this work.

On the other side of our research ... we are launching a series of new projects on bionics. And that makes me happy, as (as I kept telling to people), we are finally linking the two parts of human-machine interactions : the behavioral aspects with virtual spaces, and the fundamental biomedical aspects, with bionic applications, which could only arise from animal research. It will take time, but we are going there finally !

Lab Update

A long long time without a new blog post ... So a lot to say ! The grant period is finally over, so we can be back to normal working schedules, and finally do research again. Here are some of the main updates since the last blog post back in beginning of September.

First, the meeting in Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University was simply amazing. Extremely productive, we reinforced our collaboration with Lynn Koller there, and I met some new possible collaborators. The visit was very exciting and stimulating.

Second, papers ! We got a lot of excellent news since the last update ! The PLoS one paper on the perception of humanness of an interlocutor is now fully published (references are given at the end of this post). The Reviewers agreed that our approach was trully innovative (would I dare the "revolutionarian" ?). Anyway, so far, only excellent feedback about this work ! The paper of Anna about the distribution of avatars in (virtual) space using Second Life as a model got also accepted, and we already corrected the proofs, so we expect it online in the very coming days. The corrections asked by the Reviewers were the most minimalistic I ever saw, which says a lot about the quality of this particular paper and about its possible impact. Finally, I submitted a paper on a meta-media (the Galactic News Network of the Second Life Star Wars Role-Play community), and, this paper elicited a very good feedback from both Editor and Reviewers (even if I had to do some corrections, but well, that is the fate of any paper somehow), and it is now Accepted ! Meaning that now we actually have 3 papers about Second Life and 2 about World of Warcraft ... We are really exploiting those models fully I think (even if we are now working to gather information from other models too).

Lortie CL, Guitton MJ (2011) Judgment of the Humanness of an Interlocutor is in the Eye of the Beholder. PLoS ONE, 6:e25085.

I am using Twitter really a lot now, so most of the litterature updates are done there ... But I may be doing an over-view of some recent litterature update here soon too, to make sure you don't miss some interesting things to read (winter is coming in Canada, we need things to read for the cold evenings).

Lab Update

Well, as I was telling you in the last post, I am in the "grant writing period" ... So blogging is slow ... Still, some important updates:

1) Anna Lomanovska, PhD, postdoctoral fellow in my lab, got the very prestigious and competitive FRSQ Postdoctoral Fellowship grant ! Now she is funded for 2 more years, so we will be able to do really good things I am sure ! Well done, Anna, congratulations !

2) Talking about grants, Catherine also got the FRSQ Student grant for her Master Degree in my lab, but unfortunately, she had to say no since she already got the NSERC Alexander Graham Bell grant ... Still, that means that we are probably not the worse lab in the world if everybody gets grants here ! (or that I am lucky to attract only the best people, which I do believe too).

3) Twitter, twitter, twitter, I so love twitter ... Definitively, Twitter has really an ideal format for me, short and efficient messages, perfect for litterature updates and so on. So, people, if you want to follow what we are doing, follow me on Twitter @matthieuguitton

4) I will be in Florida in 1 week now, at the Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University. Beside giving a lecture on cyberbehavior (Multi-Modal Aspects of Immersion in Virtual Spaces), I will be participing to two courses there: "Visual Design" and "Technology and Modern Civilization". That will be most interesting I think.

5) Papers ... things are advancing, the PLoS ONE of Catherine is in press, as is the chapter on "Cyber Behaviors in Canada" of the "Encyclopedia of Cyberbehavior", and we have currently 4 other papers submitted (even if, of course, some will be longer to publish than others).