Great news for the whole HumaniVR team: our colleague and friend Mathis Göcht, who has been a key member of HumaniVR since 15 January 2021(!), won the award for the best Master’s Thesis in Hildesheim in 2022, donated by the Universitätsgesellschaft Hildesheim e.V.. His thesis entitled „Kommunikatives Handeln in Virtual Reality – Experimente in außergewöhnlichen Wahrnehmungsräumen” [Communicative Action in Virtual Reality — experiments in extraordinary spaces of perception] covers the cognitive and linguistic effects that VR immersion has on deixis and common ground emergence. It contributes highly significant groundwork to cognitive linguistic questions on how space and directions are processed in and through language. His work represents a prime example of what HumaniVR has been striving to do in the last years.
Together with the mayor of Hildesheim, Dr. Ingo Meyer, and the president of the University of Hildesheim, Prof. Dr. May-Britt Kallenrode, the Universitätsgesellschaft e.V. and its guests celebrated Mathis’s excellent work in Hildesheim’s City Hall on June 13th 2023. The award comes with a prize money of 500€. Congratulations, Mathis!