Research
Our team of researchers has diverse interests that we aggregated into four areas.
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Cognitive Engineering
This research focuses on modeling how landmarks are perceived, represented, and used across different sensory modalities—visual, auditory, and olfactory—within diverse environmental contexts such as urban areas, natural landscapes, and aquatic settings. By examining how individuals recognize and recall landmarks through multiple senses, the study seeks to uncover how multimodal cues influence spatial orientation and navigation. A combination of controlled experiments, user studies, and field observations is used to investigate these effects across different populations and scenarios. The research further explores how landmarks can be personalized to match user preferences, abilities, and situational needs, supporting the design of adaptive navigation systems that enhance wayfinding, environmental awareness, and spatial memory.
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Agent-based modelling and simulation
This research?focuses on simulating how individual agents—such as people, vehicles, or autonomous systems—move, interact, and make decisions in spatial environments. Each agent follows its own rules and goals, allowing complex collective patterns to emerge from simple behaviors. This approach helps to understand and predict real-world dynamics such as human wayfinding and navigation, pedestrian flows in city centers, evacuation processes in stadiums, visitor movements in the Bavarian National Forest, or the coordination of multi-modal transport systems. It also supports the development of intelligent mobility solutions, including self-navigating buses on university campuses.
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Geoinformatics in Archaeology
This research focuses on visualizing geospatial information and facilitating human reasoning.?
Geospatial visual interface
Geospatial visual interfaces provide intuitive, interactive ways to explore and understand location-based data. They range from analytical dashboards that integrate maps, charts, and metrics for real-time insight, to narrative-driven storytelling tools that guide users through spatial patterns and scenarios. On desktop environments, these interfaces support detailed analysis and comparison, while emerging VR/AR platforms enable immersive, embodied interaction with geospatial information—allowing users to navigate complex spaces, observe spatial relationships at human scale, and engage more deeply with mobility, environment, and urban dynamics.
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