Click here for session details.

Maria C. R. Harrington is an artist and information scientist, who is an Assistant Professor of Digital Media in the Department of Games and Interactive Media with a secondary joint appointment in the UCF Learning Science Cluster, at the University of Central Florida. She has an undergraduate degree from Carnegie Mellon in economics and art with a Ph.D. in information sciences from the University of Pittsburgh. Her areas of expertise are in art and design, information science, human-computer interaction, and AR and VR informal learning system design. She has been PI or Co-PI on research in Virtual Nature and its applications. Awarded a UCF grant from the UCF/Office of Research & Commercialization, VPR Advancement of Early Career Researchers (AECR) 2018, she is engaged in innovative and creative research with the Department of Psychology on immersive multimodal applications using The Virtual UCF Arboretum and a treadmill. Awarded an Artist in Residence Fellowship in 2018, and invited to become a Research Associate with the Carnegie Museum of Natural History, Powdermill Nature Reserve, she designed and developed The AR Perpetual Garden Apps. In 2020, she received an Epic Mega Grant to refine AR/VR Virtual Nature models, ranging from Maine to Florida to the Epic marketplace, worldwide. She has published original research in Virtual Reality, ACM SIGGRAPH, IEEE VR, ACM IDC, The Curator: the Museum Journal, MW (MuseWeb) conferences, and IEEE Transactions on Learning Technologies. Her research projects are free to download from her lab webpage: https://virtualnature.org/