The CYBERNEUM is a new facility for basic research in the area of human perception and human-machine interaction. It is part of the Department of Cognitive and Computational Psychophysics (Prof. H. Bülthoff) at the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics.

Sensory perception is the basis for our under-standing of the world. However, our sensory perception is by no means always reliable. To understand the brain is to study processes of human sensory perception under the most natural but also under the most precisely controlled test conditions possible. Rapid developments in computer graphics in the last 10 years, along with new algorithms and hardware for realistic simulations of reality ("virtual reality", or "VR" for short), have given us the necessary tools for experiments in which the flow of information between sensory perception and action can be specifically influenced for the purpose of acquiring scientific results. The reactions of test persons in such virtual reality experiments allow us to draw conclusions about the brain's processing mechanisms. In our investigation of sensory integration, we study how information from various sensory modalities (e.g. sight, touch, and hearing) are processed conjointly, thus providing an integral experience and perception of the world.