CONVERGENCE Doctoral Researcher Abby Rurenko attended a summer school “EMOTIONAL ERGONOMICS OF IMMERSIVE VIRTUAL ENVIRONMENT“ at the University of Milano-Bicocca, in Milan, Italy during the 29-31 of Mayб 2024.
“It has been a great experience both topic and people-wise. The university has made a good effort to cover the topic from different perspectives — we had lecturers also from two other Italian universities and one Swiss university”, Abby describes her experience.
In the first place, Abby was looking for an opportunity to go to a summer school hoping to meet new people internationally as well as to learn something new. The topic she ended up choosing sounded interesting and intriguing, and since Abby knew that she will be dealing with VR in her experiments, and since she thought that knowledge about emotions might be useful since dealing with construction workers and their intense job, her intuition told her to take the opportunity.
During summer school, Abby broadened her understanding of emotions as a phenomenon and their role in VR experience.
‘’The topic challenged some of my previous views and showed how much cultural background affects understanding of emotions’’, Abby explains.
In addition to learning about the topic, Abby also had the chance to meet a bunch of great researchers, to make connections with other PhD students, and to plan collaborations that could be possible in the future. The experience gave inspiration and motivation to continue Abby’s own research – when seeing something and someone new and learning about their projects, it refreshes one’s thinking.
