The Inria Rennes - Bretagne Atlantique Centre is one of Inria's eight centres and has more than thirty research teams. The Inria Center is a major and recognized player in the field of digital sciences. It is at the heart of a rich R&D and innovation ecosystem: highly innovative PMEs, large industrial groups, competitiveness clusters, research and higher education players, laboratories of excellence, technological research institute, etc.

The “Nemo.ai” laboratory is a joint laboratory dedicated to research and applications in Metaverse and Virtual Reality, gathering Inria (the French national research institute for computer science, www.inria.fr) and Interdigital company (www.interdigital.com/).

The present postdoc aims at investigating novel usages of haptic technologies for augmenting the user experience in metaverse and virtual worlds. Haptic interfaces correspond to tactile and force-feedback systems providing means of for physical and tangible interactions within virtual reality systems. This postdoctoral program represents a highly exploratory journey meant to reveal novel usages of haptic feedback for augmenting the perceptual or interaction capabilities of user in virtual environments, enabling some kind of novel “super-powers”. For instance, [Willett and al. 2022] provide examples of “superpower” metaphor using the human visual system to enhance users’ cognitive abilities. In our case, the sense of touch could notably be used to sense the invisible properties of the environment around users, or to inform about incoming events/alerts. The successful post-doctoral fellow will therefore conceive, implement, and evaluate such novel haptic approaches, progressively defining a taxonomy of “haptic super-powers”.

To sum up with, the role of the post-doctoral fellow in this project will be:

• To invent novel haptic and VR approaches meant to augment 3D interactions in virtual environments and increase the capabilities or perceptions of the user
• To implement the subsequent interactive techniques and haptic rendering algorithms
• To conduct human experiments to assess the novel techniques in terms of either user experience or 3D task performance
• To analyze the experimental data of participants
• To write scientific papers
• To present the research in project meetings and conferences

• Subsidized meals
• Partial reimbursement of public transport costs
• Possibility of teleworking (90 days per year) and flexible organization of working hours
• Partial payment of insurance costs

Monthly gross salary between 2653 € and 4150 € depending on work experience