Post-doctoral Research Visit F/m Avatar Embodiment and Multisensory Integration in Immersive Populated Spaces

Le descriptif de l’offre ci-dessous est en Anglais_

**Type de contrat**: CDD

**Niveau de diplôme exigé**: Thèse ou équivalent

**Fonction**: Post-Doctorant

**Niveau d'expérience souhaité**: Jusqu'à 3 ans

**A propos du centre ou de la direction fonctionnelle**:
The Inria Centre at Rennes University is one of Inria's eight centres and has more than thirty research teams. The Inria Centre is a major and recognized player in the field of digital sciences. It is at the heart of a rich R&D and innovation ecosystem: highly innovative PMEs, large industrial groups, competitiveness clusters, research and higher education players, laboratories of excellence, technological research institute, etc.

**Contexte et atouts du poste**:
**About the Center**:
Inria is the French national research institute for digital science and technology. At its core are world-class research, technological innovation, and entrepreneurial ambition. Within 215 project teams — most of them jointly established with top research universities — more than 3,900 researchers and engineers explore new frontiers, often through interdisciplinary approaches and in collaboration with industrial partners. Inria supports a wide range of innovation pathways, from the development of open-source software to the creation of Deeptech startups.

The Inria Centre at the University of Rennes was established in 1980. Its growth is closely tied to the development of the Rennes and Lannion research hubs, in partnership with the University of Rennes, University of Rennes 2, CentraleSupélec, INSA Rennes, and ENS Rennes. The centre hosts 31 project teams in Rennes (including 23 in collaboration with the IRISA joint research unit) and one in Lannion. Its activities involve over 600 people — researchers, engineers, and support staff — representing more than 50 nationalities.

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**Context**:
This postdoctoral position is offered jointly by the Inria Center at Rennes University (VirtUs team, France) and the Multisensory Brain and Cognition (MBC) Lab at the University of Waterloo (Canada). Together, these teams bring complementary expertise in human locomotion, virtual reality (VR) interaction, virtual humans and avatars, and multisensory integration to investigate how virtual embodiment and sensory constraints influence behavior and self-representation in immersive environments.

Building on this, the postdoctoral research will explore how visual field of view (FOV) limitations as well as manipulations of body representation fidelity impact natural locomotion, obstacle avoidance, and social navigation in VR. The Immersia and Immermove platforms at Inria provide ideal testbeds for systematically manipulating FOV and avatar characteristics during dynamic interactions. By comparing behaviors in immersive VR and real-world scenarios, this project aims to identify how restrictions in sensory feedback, such as limited vertical FOV or lack of avatar representation, disrupt naturalistic motor control and interpersonal coordination.

This project is an excellent opportunity for a researcher interested in the intersection of sensorimotor neuroscience, VR technology, and human-computer interaction, with access to world-class facilities and an interdisciplinary supervisory team.

**Mission confiée**:
The general objective of this postdoctoral project is to investigate how visual self-motion feedback, FOV constraints, and avatar characteristics shape embodiment, locomotor control, and social navigation in immersive populated virtual environments. Through close collaboration between VR engineers and computer scientists at Inria VirtUs and neuroscientists and researchers at the University of Waterloo’s Multisensory Brain and Cognition Lab, the project seeks to model and experimentally validate the multisensory computations underlying a coherent sense of self and presence in VR when navigating through crowded environments.

By developing experimental paradigms that manipulate congruency between real and virtual self-motion, avatar identity, and sensory field limitations, the project aims to:

- Understand the neurocognitive mechanisms of avatar embodiment and multisensory integration in VR.
- Quantify how these mechanisms affect movement coordination, obstacle avoidance, and social interactions with other agents or avatars.
- Contribute to the design of more ecologically valid and perceptually robust VR experiences, particularly in constrained or mínimal-sensing setups.

Ultimately, this research will help to define computational and behavioral signatures of virtual embodiment, enabling predictive models of user behavior under varying sensory and representational constraints. These models may also inform therapeutic VR, performance enhancement, or training in sensorimotor-disruptive environments.

**Principales activités**:
The main activities of the post-doctoral fellow will be:

- To develop and run immersive VR experiments manipulating visual FOV, avatar fidelity (e.g., biologi