What

An embodied virtual-reality platform for studying how people learn real-world motor skills. Subjects held a real pool cue and struck a real ball while seeing the scene in VR, with motion capture and EEG recorded alongside. The virtual ball’s trajectory matched physical measurements, and short-term learning in VR matched what had been reported for the physical task — so the setup lets you manipulate what someone sees while keeping the body and the physics real.

Why it mattered

Motor-learning research usually trades realism for control: lab tasks are measurable but artificial. This platform kept the task real and made it controllable, which is the same gap — raw, messy behaviour versus a clean, interpretable measurement — that runs through the rest of this timeline.

My role

Built the platform as my MSc dissertation in the Brain & Behaviour Lab at Imperial College London, integrating motion capture, VR, and EEG.

Outcome

Published in PLOS ONE (January 2021), second author. The platform remains the basis for ongoing research at Imperial. MSc awarded with Distinction.