Richard Wetzel

Dr Richard Wetzel is an Associate Professor in the School of Design of the College of Computing and Digital Media. He has been researching different types of playful realities since 2006. His main research interests revolve around the design of serious games and augmented and virtual reality technologies. Richard is interested in combining digital and physical experiences, and has created several of these for gaming, cultural, educational, and industrial purposes. In his interdisciplinary work it is important for him to include stakeholders with different backgrounds and levels of experience in the design process with the help of custom-made authoring tools and card-based ideation techniques. Richard holds a PhD in Computer Science from the University of Nottingham (UK) where he was a member of the Mixed Reality Lab. Richard has worked as researcher and academic for Fraunhofer FIT (Germany), the University of Lincoln (UK), and the Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts (Switzerland). In 2018 he co-founded the Immersive Realities Research Lab and served as its co-director until 2023 establishing it as one of the most prominent places for AR/VR research in Switzerland. Richard has been a member of various EU-research projects and coordinated national and international research projects. Recent project examples include a VR training game for beekeepers, a VR diving game for people with cystic fibrosis, a narrative game about sex education for people with cognitive disabilities, and a hybrid AR learning application for understanding electricity. At DePaul, Richard is the director of the Hybrid Experience Lab (HexLab). https://hexlab.cdm.depaul.edu/