Peter Werkhoven

Professorship chair

Multimodal interaction in virtual environments (Utrecht University)

Research area

My research and teaching activities are about human perception and interaction in computer simulated worlds, focusing on:

• Tactile and brain-computer interfaces for navigating simulated worlds, e.g. How can you see with your skin? How can you move your avatar in a game by just thought?
• Affect, stress and body ownership in augmented reality, e.g. How to measure and control your stress level while playing a game? How to reconstruct a game designer’s goal based on game characteristics? How to let you feel and control a virtual or robotic arm as if it’s your own arm?
• Meaningful control of autonomous intelligent systems, e.g. How to tell autonomous (super) intelligent systems ‘what to do’, assuring alignment with ‘human values’? The impact of this research is in the application domains of effective training simulators, intuitive tele-operations and responsible development of AI systems.

These application domains are relevant for the TNO roadmaps ‘Operations & Human Factors’ and ‘Maritime & Offshore’ (tele-robotics) and  for the TNO Early Research Programs ‘i-Botics’ and ‘Artificial Intelligence’.

Top publications

• Nadisha-Marie Aliman, Leon Kester, Peter Werkhoven and Roman Yampolskiy (2019). Orthogonality-based disentanglement of responsibilities for ethical intelligent systems. Proceedings of the 12th Conference on Artificial General Intelligence (AGI-2019), August 6-9, 2019, Shenzhen, China. Doi: 10.1007/978-3-030-27005-6_3.
• Nina Rosa, Jean-Paul van Bommel, Wolfgang Hürst, Tanja Nijboer, Remco Veltkamp and Peter Werkhoven (2019). Embodying an extra virtual body in augmented reality. Proceedings of the 26th IEEE Conference on Virtual Reality and 3D User Interfaces, March 23-27, Osaka, Japan. Doi: 10.1109/VR.2019.8798055.
• Peter Werkhoven, Leon Kester, & Mark Neerincx (2018). Telling autonomous systems what to do. In Proceedings of the 36th European Conference on Cognitive Ergonomics (ECCE'18). ACM, New York, NY, USA, Article 2. Doi: 10.1145/3232078.3232238.