Oliver Kobián

I am currently in my first year at the Ph.D. programme of General Anthropology at the Faculty of Humanities, Charles University. My dissertation is named Presence and immersion in virtual environments and how they influence the transfer of knowledge and skills into reality.

In my previous studies, I focused on locomotion methods in Virtual reality and how they affect navigation and spatial memory, and also how the navigated environment can affect navigation and spatial memory. In my dissertation, I will study the transfer of knowledge from VR to reality and how immersion and presence can affect this transfer. In my next project, we plan to translate and validate a questionnaire measuring presence on a large sample in the Czech population.

I love playing video games, which is where my passion for virtual reality comes from. Other than that, I play curling competitively, and with my team, we are currently in the Czech extraleague. I work at the Faculty of Humanities as a secretary and at the National Institute of Mental Health, and the Psychological Institute of the Czech Academy of Sciences on various projects, more or less related to my dissertation. I also teach social psychology at PVSPS.