Wendy Lawn

Wendy Lawn

Virtual Intern

Wendy Lawn is a MA Virtual Reality student with the University of West England, Bristol, UK and member of  the Bristol Virtual Reality Lab.

She has been accepted on to the virtual intern programme with the Empathic Computing Laboratory at the University of Auckland, New Zealand where she will work with PhD candidate, Mairi Gunn, on the her project: Face-to-face: using XR, including HMD and 3D projection, to maximise co-presence and resonance in inter-human encounters.

Wendy has 16 years experience in the edutech industry, notably in the aviation, defence, and software industries. She returned to university to explore the medium of VR, AR and other extended realities for education, training and experiential learning. She is interested in exploring empathy and the way it impacts participants in XR. She is currently working on a group project using Ultraleap Stratos Explore devkit and Leap Motion controllers in Unity, for the Oculus Quest. Her research topics include virtual beings, and the use of VR and XR for social impact, for instance, to challenge preconceptions that drive negative traits such as xenophobia, racism and sexism.