Recent Lab News

Tom Stoffregen, PhD, professor in the School of Kinesiology and director of the Affordance Perception-Action Laboratory (APAL), was recently interviewed and quoted by the New York Times.

“It's been a huge challenge to stay competitive and training so many hours with school, but I've managed decently. I've got a really good team of coaches and, in school, everybody's incredibly helpful. My professors help me get assignments done, get extensions, or make up for absences when I compete. It’s a challenge, but not unmanageable.”

Action Laboratory (APAL), recently gave a keynote presentation entitled, "Ecological theory of motion sickness" at the Motion Sickness Workshop in Caen, France.

On May 4, Tom Stoffregen, PhD, professor in the School of Kinesiology and director of the Affordance Perception-Action Laboratory (APAL), was invited to speak in-person at COMETE, a laboratory devoted to research on how mobility is related to aging, pathology, and health, at the University of Caen-Normandy, France.

To celebrate the end of Women’s History Month, the School of Kinesiology asked a few of our members about how women have positively impacted and empowered their lives.

Why is car sickness a problem for some people but not for others? Why can our bodies easily able to adapt to being on the open water? It’s all a matter of perception, as researchers in the U of M’s Affordance Perception-Action Laboratory (APAL) will gladly share.

Eugenia Garza, a first-year undergraduate student and kinesiology major, has been awarded a University Research Scholarship (URS) for her project, “Head tilt and cybersickness in head-mounted displays.”

Tom Stoffregen, PhD, professor in the School of Kinesiology and director of the Affordance Perception-Action Laboratory (APAL,) George Bailey, a graduate student researcher in APAL, Fei Wu, a doctoral student in computer science at the U of M, and Evan Suma Rosenberg, PhD, an associate professor of computer science at the U of M, received an honorable mention for best paper at the ACM (Association for Computing Machinery) Spatial User Interaction 2021 virtual conference.

Postural sway research by Thomas Stoffregen, Ph.D., professor and director of the Affordance Perception-Action Laboratory (APAL) in the School of Kinesiology, was featured November 2 in the popular television game show Jeopardy! Stoffregen and his colleagues (Fuch-Chen Chen, Manuel Varlet, Christina Alcantara, Benoit Bardy) published the groundbreaking article “Getting your sea legs,” in PLOS ONE […]

Doctoral graduates DJ McDonough, PhD, (advisor, Zan Gao, PhD,) Justin Munafo, PhD, (advisor, Tom Stoffregen, PhD,) Nicolette Peterson, PhD, (advisor, Tom Stoffregen, PhD,) and Ruth Rath, PhD, (advisor, Michael Wade, PhD.)

Postural sway research by Thomas Stoffregen, Ph.D., professor and director of the Affordance Perception-Action Laboratory (APAL) in the School of Kinesiology, is under consideration for use on the television game show Jeopardy! Stoffregen and his colleagues (Fuch-Chen Chen, Manuel Varlet, Christina Alcantara, Benoit Bardy) published the seminal article “Getting your sea legs,” in PLOS ONE […]

School of Kinesiology professor Thomas Stoffregen, PhD, published an article titled, "Structure of variability in scanning movement predicts braille reading performance in children," in Scientific Reports on March 30, 2021. The study looked at children learning to read braille. Over a period of 12 months, researchers recorded the position and orientation of the reading fingers of eight congenitally or early blind children.

School of Kinesiology professor Thomas Stoffregen, PhD, was recently interviewed for a Yachting World article, “Seasickness cure: Could VR be the future?”

School of Kinesiology professor Thomas Stoffregen, PhD, is a recent co-author of the article, “Control of a virtual vehicle influences postural activity and motion sickness in pre-adolescent children” published online in the Human Movement Science journal.

School of Kinesiology professor Thomas Stoffregen, PhD, published an article titled, "Structure of variability in scanning movement predicts braille reading performance in children," in Scientific Reports on March 30, 2021. The study looked at children learning to read braille. Over a period of 12 months, researchers recorded the position and orientation of the reading fingers of eight congenitally or early blind children.

What happens to our Kinesiology graduates after they leave Cooke Hall? Recently we spoke with Kinesiology PhD graduate Hannah Walter to tell us about life after school and share her words of advice and wisdom.

Justin Munafo is a graduate student in the School of Kinesiology, at the University of Minnesota. He is pursuing a PhD in Kinesiology with a minor in Human Factors. He currently works for Google as a User Experience Researcher in California.

School of Kinesiology PhD students and members of the Affordance Perception-Action Laboratory (APAL) Chris Curry, Nicollete Peterson, and Ruth Rath, published work in Frontiers in Virtual Reality along with Thomas Stoffregen, PhD, professor and director of APAL.

Thomas Stoffregen, PhD, professor in the School of Kinesiology and director of the Affordance Perception-Action Laboratory (APAL), published an article on November 26, 2020 titled, “Effects of physical driving experience on body movement and motion sickness among passengers in a virtual vehicle.” The article was published in the Experimental Brain Research Journal and was co-authored by former School of Kinesiology PhD student, Chih‐Hui Chang, PhD.

 School of Kinesiology professor and director of the Affordance Perception-Action Laboratory, Thomas Stoffregen, PhD, was invited to join a group of experts in summarizing the current state of the field in “cybersickness.” In an article published in the International Journal of Human-Computer Interaction titled “Identifying Causes of and Solutions for Cybersickness in Immersive Technology: Reformulation of a Research […]