Bernhard Riecke

Brainstormer, Change Agent, Concerned citizen, Designer, Educator/Teacher, Environmentalist, Explorer, Idea generator, Inventor, Photographer, Scientist, Technologist

Bernhard is Professor at SFU’s School of Interactive Arts and Technology (SIAT), where he and directs the iSpace Lab at, a transdisciplinary research team designing and investigating emerging technologies such as Virtual Reality for positive impact on individuals and society. He likes to go beyond traditional disciplinary boundaries, combining natural sciences approaches (being a physicist by training) with human-centered and creative approaches (drawing from Psychology, Cognitive Science, Meditation, HCI, Design, Art and more), leveraging emerging technologies such as immersive Virtual Reality (VR) which he’s been researching since 1995. Starting off researching how we orient and move through real and virtual spaces, he is increasingly interested in exploring how we could utilize the potential of emerging technologies and specifically multi-sensory “extended realities” like Virtual and Mixed Reality to foster meaningful or even pivotal/transformative experiences and profound emotional shifts that we might otherwise never be able to experience. After researching for a decade in the Virtual Reality Group of the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics in Tübingen, Germany and working as a post-doctoral researcher at Vanderbilt University and UC Santa Barbara, Bernhard joined SFU in 2008. He gave a TEDx talk on the potential of Virtual Reality at TEDxEastVan in 2017 on "Could Virtual Reality make us more human?" and at TEDactive 2012 on “Moving You, in and through Virtual Reality”. He supports TEDXSFU as it's general chair since 2015, where he also coached more than 30 TEDx speakers. He teaches classes on immersive environments/Virtual Reality, game design, human-computer interaction and cognition, and quantitative research methods, and designed an intensive (15 credit) “Semester in Alternate Realities” course first offered in 2019, and re-designed it to a 6-credit intensive summer intersession course for 2023, merging project-based learning and ungrading.

Transformative experience design. Virtual Reality. World changing. Kayaking. Transformative VR and games. Climate change. VR/XR. Purposeful research. Ungrading. Researching and designing for self-transcendent experiences (using VR, dance, psychedelics or any combination thereof and more…)

Virtual reality is becoming increasingly accessible and affordable, and offers the unique opportunity to provide first-hand and embodied experiences. How could we use this potential to go beyond entertainment and gaming, for creating positive or even transformational experiences we might otherwise not be able to have? And how could we democratize the medium and put this powerful technology into the creative hands of more people? Since my TEDxEastVan 2017 talk we explored this further in my research and teaching…

designing transformational experiences, finding innovative solutions, immersion, innovation, locomotion interfaces for VR, overview effect, science, Self-motion illusions, spatial cognition, spatial perception, spatial updating, transformative experience design, ungrading, vection, Virtual Reality

Photography. Tango Argentino. Intuition. Finding creative solutions