MLD at the International Press Visit

Last week, MPI took part in an international press visit organized by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Municipality of Nijmegen. A group of journalists visited the Latin School, where they joined short presentations and demos from Donders Institute partners.

From MPI, Eleanor Huizeling (MLD) opened her session with a behind-the-scenes look at our institute’s Motion Capture Lab, followed by a brief overview of how we study gestures, expressions, and body movement using our Vicon system. She also showed how new tools support data processing and analysis, including:

• eye-tracking to see where speakers look during interaction

• automated speech transcription and word-onset extraction

• gesture-generation pilots for multimodal analysis

• VR setups used for communication-partner training, assessment tasks, and therapy scenarios

She also introduced our work with Virtual Reality, especially its applications in healthcare: 

• communication-partner training, assessment, and therapy

• immersive environments that can increase training time and reduce travel barriers

• AI in VR — how AI-driven virtual agents could, in the future, help make training or therapy in VR more personalised.

The session ended with a VR demo, with setup and technical support from Paul Van der Laan.

The MoCap Lab session was part of a broader program that also included a welcome by Radboud University’s Scientific Director Edward de Haan, a demo of focused Ultrasound by Dr. Julian Kosciessa,  and an immersive VR muZIEum experience. It was a valuable opportunity to share the story of how our 1,400+ researchers advance understanding of the human brain, cognition, and behaviour.