Jenny Gabel Successfully Defends Her PhD Dissertation

2 May 2025

Photo: CSMC

Congratulations to Jenny Gabel on defending her doctoral dissertation and completing her PhD in Computer Science! The viva voce examination took place on 28 April 2025.

Jenny Gabel wrote her dissertation on Immersive Inscribed Spaces: Spatial Interaction Techniques for Understanding Written Artefacts, which is directly connected with two research projects at the Cluster of Excellence UWA: ‘The Interior of the Church in Lucklum A Compendium of Early Modern European Emblematics’ (RFB05) and ‘Immersive City Scripts: Inscriptions and the Construction of Social Spaces in Miletus (Asia Minor)’ (RFB02). In these projects, Jenny and her colleagues developed an interactive VR environment that allows users to experience the historical inscriptions found in these places in their original spatial context, making it possible to understand how exactly these written artefacts were structuring the space they were put in, how they were designed, who they were directed to, and much more.

In addition to its value for research, these applications also yield great potential for knowledge transfer and science communication. They have already been presented at several public events, for example last year’s Science City Day, and were also introduced to museums staff and students.  

The dissertation was supervised by Frank Steinicke and Susanne Schmidt from the HITLab at the University of Canterbury, in Christchurch, New Zealand. Ralf Möller and Eva Bittner from UHH, as well as Anil Ufuk Batmaz from Concordia University in Montreal, Canada, served on the examination board.

You can learn about Jenny’s thesis in the latest episode of the GenAI podcast ‘Research of HCI Hamburg’.