Ihshan was formally trained in psychology. He is a child activist who is concerned about the psychological well-being of children. He puts forward his ideas through writing in newspapers, giving speeches in online media as well as the national television of Indonesia. He is very passionate about learning how the brain communicates and functions in order to understand human psychology and behavior.
He studied in depth about neuropsychology in the lab of Prof. Wim Fias, Department of experimental psychology, Ghent University, Belgium. He is very much interested in collaborating with people from different fields so that innovative ideas can be generated. For his PhD project, Ihshan is investigating how the brains are getting synchronized or connected (hyperscanning) when the owners of the brains are communicating in virtual Reality. Apart from that, he is a person who knows how to entertain his brain by reading novels and playing violin.
Website: https://www.igumilar.com/
Collaborative Virtual Reality have been the subject of research for nearly three decades now. This has led to a deep understanding of how individuals interact in such environments and some of the factors that impede these interactions. However, despite this knowledge we still do not fully understand how inter-personal interactions in virtual environments are reflected in the physiological domain. This project seeks to answer the question by monitoring neural activity of participants in collaborative virtual environments. We do this by using a technique known as Hyperscanning, which refers to the simultaneous acquisition of neural activity from two or more people. In this project we use Hyperscanning to determine if individuals interacting in a virtual environment exhibit inter-brain synchrony. The goal of this project is to first study the phenomenon of inter-brain synchrony, and then find means of inducing and expediting it by making changes in the virtual environment. This project feeds into the overarching goals of the Empathic Computing Laboratory that seek to bring individuals closer using technology as a vehicle to evoke empathy.
Gumilar, I., Sareen, E., Bell, R., Stone, A., Hayati, A., Mao, J., ... & Billinghurst, M. (2021). A comparative study on inter-brain synchrony in real and virtual environments using hyperscanning. Computers & Graphics, 94, 62-75.
Gumilar, I., Barde, A., Hayati, A. F., Billinghurst, M., Lee, G., Momin, A., ... & Dey, A. (2021, May). Connecting the Brains via Virtual Eyes: Eye-Gaze Directions and Inter-brain Synchrony in VR. In Extended Abstracts of the 2021 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (pp. 1-7).
Barde, A., Gumilar, I., Hayati, A. F., Dey, A., Lee, G., & Billinghurst, M. (2020, December). A Review of Hyperscanning and Its Use in Virtual Environments. In Informatics (Vol. 7, No. 4, p. 55). Multidisciplinary Digital Publishing Institute.
Gumilar, I., Barde, A., Sasikumar, P., Billinghurst, M., Hayati, A. F., Lee, G., ... & Momin, A. (2022, April). Inter-brain Synchrony and Eye Gaze Direction During Collaboration in VR. In CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems Extended Abstracts (pp. 1-7).