I’m a virtual reality researcher and interaction designer. I’m part of the Ghostlab with Professor Casper Harteveld, and primarily work on problems related to social VR. The working title of my dissertation is “Biopolitics of Social VR”, and it explores social VR communities and their relationship to systems of power via the lens of biopolitics, mostly through an ethnographic lens.
I’ve also done work on many smaller projects in the domains of data visualization (in XR), physical therapy applications (in VR) and training simulations (in VR) as well as general UX design (for XR). I use a wide range of methods ranging from quantitative experimental design to ethnography, but the through line across my work is that it’s generally about XR in some way.
Prior to my time at Northeastern, I graduated from the MIT Media Lab, in the Fluid Interfaces group, where I wrote a thesis called An Integrated System for Interaction in Virtual Environments. Prior to that, I completed an undergraduate degree at Wellesley College in Political Science and Media Arts and Sciences.
Research/Publications Highlights
Simonson, Aubrey, Dana Gretton, and Casper Harteveld. “Bird: A Point Cursor for Virtual Immersive Environments.”Proceedings of the Extended Abstracts of the CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. 2025.
Simonson, Aubrey, et al. “There’s YourProblem: Spatial Localization of DesignFlaws in Virtual Reality TrainingSimulations.” Proceedings of theExtended Abstracts of the CHIConference on Human Factors inComputing Systems. 2025.
Simonson, Aubrey, and Guodong Shao.”An Authoring Tool for Mixed RealityInterfaces for Digital Twins inManufacturing.” IFIP International Conference on Advances in ProductionManagement Systems. Cham: SpringerNature Switzerland, 2024.
Simonson, Aubrey. “Pockets:User-assigned menus based on physical buttons for virtual environments.” ACM SIGGRAPH 2021 Posters. 2021. 1-2.
Departments
Interdisciplinary, Art + Design
Education
- MS, Media Arts and Sciences, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
- BA, Political Science, Wellesley College
Awards
- Graduate Fellowship for STEM Diversity (2023)
Research Focus
- VR
- Social VR
- Governance
Courses Taught
- Foundations of Game Design