User Experience Research · Spatial Computing · AR/VR/MR
The environment is part of the interface
The work here asked a researchable question: when information lives in three dimensions around a person, what changes in how they understand it, feel it, and act on it. Every answer on this page came from a controlled study.
The same question ran through every project
Across a virtual operating room, a study pitting spatial overlay against print, a retail presence experiment, eye-tracking with practicing radiologists, and a survey of working designers, one theme kept surfacing: the space around an interface changes what people understand, feel, and do.
The work runs in sequence. It starts by building an immersive environment people could learn inside, tests whether spatial media outperforms conventional media on the same content, isolates the mechanism that makes it work, follows attention down to the movement of the eye, and closes by asking why design teams are slow to adopt tools that demonstrably help.
- Build
VR Operating Room: Immersive Visualization Lab
- Comparison
Spatial overlay vs flat media: Print / AR / mixed reality
- Mechanism
Presence mediates UX: HMD and desktop VR experiments
- Attention
Eye-tracking in clinic: Healthcare technology
- Adoption
Why designers don't adopt: Field study, 54 practitioners
- BUILD
Virtual Operating Room
New residents and operating-room staff had to learn an unfamiliar, equipment-dense space from detached materials: manuals, lectures, static diagrams. None of those convey the thing that actually matters in an OR, which is where everything sits in relation to everything else, and to user.
Co-created with the University of Missouri School of Medicine, this simulator turned room layout, equipment, and procedural workflow into something staff could practice inside. Stereoscopic 3D for depth. Controller-driven navigation for movement. The space itself did the teaching.
Fig. 01 · Stereoscopic dual view of the operating room, captured in the headset.
Fig. 02 · Room and equipment measured and rebuilt digitally to scale.
A functional prototype that ran on real hardware.
A working, navigable environment used in sessions with real clinical staff.
Operating-room workflow modeled in 3D.
Bed, lights, anesthesia cart, monitors, and supply zones positioned to procedural reality and modeled to scale.
Embodied interaction.
Controller-driven navigation let users travel the room and build its spatial relationships firsthand.
Role: 3D modeling, in-VR UI, and interaction design.
Co-created the simulator inside the Immersive Visualization Lab.
- Comparison
Spatial overlay outperformed conventional media for product information
When someone evaluates a product, the information that shapes their judgment arrives through whatever medium happens to carry it: a printed sheet, a tablet screen, or content anchored in space around the object itself. This study tested all three with the same product and the same content, in a three-condition within-subject design: print, tablet AR, and head-mounted mixed reality.
The media split along different strengths. Print drove the highest cognitive involvement. The spatial condition, where information was overlaid and anchored to the product in the user’s real field of view, was rated the most informative of the three. The medium was not neutral: where the information lived changed how well it landed.
Fig. 03 · Sustainability information anchored to a product in head-mounted mixed reality.
PRINT MEDIA
Highest cognitive involvement
SCREEN AR
Information overlaid on screen
HMD MR
Rated by users as most informative
Three-condition within-subject design.
Every participant experienced all three media, so the differences trace to the medium itself.
Print vs. tablet AR vs. head-mounted MR.
Same product, same sustainability content, three delivery formats.
Anchored information landed best; print worked hardest.
Head-mounted mixed reality was rated the most informative format, while print produced the highest cognitive involvement.
Role: ran the study and co-built the 3D content.
Conceptual bridge
This connects to a deeper question. If the medium changes response, why? The next study isolates the mechanism.
- Mechanism
Presence is the mechanism that makes spatial media work
Spatial media changes user response, and the design question is the mechanism: what is the lever. This study ran two parallel experiments, one in a fully immersive head-mounted display and one in desktop VR, using the same high-fidelity retail environment in both. The model under test: attention shapes user experience, but indirectly, through a user’s sense of presence, the felt sense of being there.
Across both display types, presence partially mediated the effect of attention on experience. Immersion that deepened the felt sense of being there improved the experience, and attention kept a direct effect of its own. This is the empirical core of the doctoral research: the environment is a working part of the interface.
Fig. 04 · Parallel head-mounted and desktop VR retail experiments.
Two experiments, two display types.
Fully immersive HMD (stereoscopic 3D) and 2.5D desktop VR, to test whether the finding held across platforms.
Presence mediates attention's effect on experience.
Confirmed by regression analysis and Sobel test in both studies.
Role: designed, built, and ran both studies.
Mediation model
STUDY 1
c · X→Y total
c′ · X→Y direct
b · M→Y
Sobel
z = 2.19 · p = .029 · partial mediation
Reliability α
UX .89 / Pres .96 / Att .75
VIF
1.06 · no multicollinearity concern
STUDY 2
c · X→Y total
c′ · X→Y direct
b · M→Y
Sobel
z = 2.21 · p = .027 · partial mediation
Reliability α
UX .92 / Pres .96 / Att .84
VIF
1.06 · no multicollinearity concern
Recap
Attention improved experience in both studies, and part of that effect ran through presence. The direct path stayed significant too, so the mechanism is shared: presence carries a real portion of the effect, and attention still does work of its own.
- EYE-TRACKING
Eye-tracking turned gaze into design decisions
On a large healthcare technology partnership building a next-generation medical imaging platform, interviews could only carry the question so far. The real question was where clinicians actually looked: what they noticed, what they missed, what slowed them down, and where the interface created confusion.
The study put eye-tracking on practicing radiologists working through realistic reading tasks, and ran the analysis on measured gaze: dwell time, fixation count, and time to first fixation across areas of interest on each interface. Attention was measured at the level of the eye, then translated into changes a product team could act on.
Fig. 06 · Gaze visualization over a clinical reading interface, details withheld for confidentiality.
Attention measured at the eye.
Eye-tracking captured real gaze behavior from practicing radiologists, with self-report kept as a cross-check rather than the evidence.
Within-subject study with layered methods.
Quantitative usability testing with measured gaze metrics, qualitative gaze-replay analysis, and pre and post task satisfaction surveys.
Findings became concrete design changes.
Each result mapped to a specific change: reordering information, shifting emphasis, fixing a confusing control, adjusting contrast for readability.
Role: designer and researcher.
Planned the study, ran the sessions, analyzed the data, and turned the findings into recommendations the product team could execute.
Eye-tracking results
ANALYSIS OF VARIANCE
Interface A · AOI importance
Interface B · AOI importance
Attention was not uniform on either interface: some regions drew far more gaze than others.
CROSS-METHOD CHECK
Gaze vs self-reported noticeability
Gaze behavior was tested against self-reports, and the gap was significant on at least one element. Eye-tracking caught what surveys alone would miss.
Study scope and methods
PARTICIPANTS
SCOPE
5 radiology specialties, two experience groups: 5 to 9 years and 15 or more
EYE-TRACKER
30 to 60 Hz sampling, 0.5 to 1 degree accuracy
ANALYSIS
ANOVA, Tukey HSD, t-test, chi-square, scanpath protocol, heatmaps. Satisfaction by SUS and CSUQ
Gaze replay revealed how each interface was actually read
Mirrored F-shape on one surface
Gaze concentrated along the top and the leading edge, then dropped off: a predictable scan path that tells you exactly where to place what matters most.
Segregated reading on another
Attention split into separated zones instead of a single path, a sign the layout was fragmenting the read and forcing extra work.
Recap
Radiologists analyzed and synthesized one interface faster than the other, and the gaze data explained why. Eye-tracking mapped where attention concentrated, where it broke, and where the layout could be reconnected for faster, more accurate reads. Each finding became a specific, executable change for the product team.
- AR/VR Technology Adoption
A field study measured why design teams underuse tools that help
Building immersive prototypes and proving they change user response raises an obvious follow-up: if the tools help this much, why are design firms slow to adopt them.
This mixed-methods study, run at the 80-plus-person office of a 1,200-employee international design and engineering firm and published at the International Conference on Engineering Design, went looking for the barriers. A focus group surfaced them; a survey of 54 practitioners measured them.
Mixed methods.
A focus group of six practitioners surfaced the barriers; a survey of 54 measured them.
The barriers operate as one system.
Designer perception, manager attitude, and fear of learning the technology under workload pressure proved interrelated with funding, training, and technical support. The study's recommendation: start by resolving the internal barriers.
Experience and willingness did not predict attitude.
A regression found neither years of experience nor willingness to learn was a significant predictor of adoption attitude within the firm.
Role: Faculty advisor on the graduate research project and co-author.
Published at International Conference on Engineering Design, Delft
Part A
Percentage of practitioners comfortable producing each output
Practitioner comfort by output type. The more spatial the medium, the fewer designers feel comfortable producing it.
Part B
Where the barriers live
Designer perception of VR, AR, and MR
Manager attitude toward integration in design service
Perception and managerial framing, not hardware, set the ceiling on adoption.
Hardware and software availability and reliability
Training programs
Funding
Managerial support
In-house champions
Technical support
Regression finding
Years of experience was NOT a significant
predictor of adoption attitude.
F(2, 25) = 0.62 · p = .55
Within the firm, seniority told you nothing about who would adopt.
- Synthesis
What this establishes
Taken together, these projects form one argument: spatial context is a functional part of the interface. The work proved it constructively, by building a clinical simulator people learned inside, and empirically, by showing spatial overlay outperforming flat media on the same content and by isolating presence as the mechanism that makes immersive media work.
It carried the same question down to the movement of the eye, turning what radiologists looked at into concrete interface changes. The adoption study then turned the lens on the field itself, naming why teams underuse tools that demonstrably help. This is the foundation the rest of the portfolio builds on: a designer who treats the environment, and attention itself, as variables to be tested, and who pairs prototypes with the evidence that justifies them.
What it protects and enables
This research capability catches attention and comprehension failures before they ship, and turns interface debate into measured decisions. The methods that validated these spatial interfaces carry directly into regulated devices and into software used at large scale. That is the throughline of the work: product design and human factors, from medical devices to products used by millions.
What it costs to do properly
Controlled studies take time, real participants, and honest analysis. It means running accessible conditions next to high-fidelity ones, and being willing to let the data overrule the prettier design. Done properly, it replaces opinion with evidence at the point where a decision is expensive to reverse.
TOOLS
SolidWorks · 3ds Max · Unity · Oculus · HoloLens · HTC Vive · Mobile and desktop eye-trackers
IMPACT
COLLABORATORS
Immersive Visualization Lab · U of Missouri School of Medicine · U of Missouri Information Experience Lab · U of Minnesota VR Lab