Prestigious ERC Consolidator Grant to Associate Professor Joanna Bergström

- I am incredibly honoured and grateful. The ERC Consolidator Grant is one of the most competitive research grants in Europe, and receiving it is both humbling and motivating. It gives me the opportunity to take a bold step forward and explore ideas that could reshape Virtual Reality at large, says Joanna Bergström.

VR interactions that match the brain

Virtual reality allows people to move, act, and inhabit bodies beyond what is possible in the physical world. But to make this feel natural, VR systems rely on mapping techniques – the rules that translate our physical movements into virtual ones.

These techniques make it possible to walk farther in VR than your room allows, to reach farther than your arm permits, or even to move in ways you cannot in real life. Yet despite their importance, there is still no scientific foundation for how these mappings should be designed.

With her new ERC-funded research project, MOVR, Associate Professor Joanna Bergström will establish that missing foundation using insights from motor learning – the neuroscience of how humans acquire new movements, like learning to ride a bike. She explains:

- In VR, people also need to learn how to use their virtual body. By applying insights from motor learning, we can design VR interactions that align with how the brain actually works.

Wide range of applications

More effective mapping techniques could unlock far more convincing and usable VR. Today, poorly designed interactions can cause discomfort, sickness, and frustration, and limit how well skills learned in VR transfer to the real world. MOVR aims to change that fundamentally.

A solid scientific foundation for mapping techniques could improve applications ranging from surgical and emergency-response training to motor rehabilitation, therapy, learning environments, remote collaboration, and creative tools. Better VR interactions could help millions by making virtual experiences more intuitive, accessible, and impactful. 

As Bergström puts it:

- With this foundation, we can design VR interactions that are coherent with how our brains learn movements. As a result, VR interaction will be more comfortable, easy, accessible, and effective.

She is grateful for all the support from her institution that has made the project possible: 

- I am excited to continue building my research group bringing together human–computer interaction at the Department of Computer Science with motor learning research at the Department of Psychology – a direction that our work at the Pioneer Center for AI has already begun to pave.

The ERC grant amounts to almost EUR 2 million.