Since 2020, Matthew McGinity has held the Junior Professorship for Immersive Media Design at the Institute for Software and Multimedia Technology of TU Dresden. His teaching and research interests include various aspects of immersive media, ranging from the perceptual and cognitive foundations of immersive experience, to development of novel immersive multi-user systems, and applications of virtual and augmented reality in the fields of data visualisation, archaeology, museums, education and the creative arts.

Originally from Tasmania, Australia, Matthew McGinity received a Bachelor of Science and a Bachelor of Arts degree from the University of Melbourne in 1996 and a Bachelor of Computing Honours degree from Monash University in Melbourne a year later. He received his doctorate in philosophy from the University of New South Wales, Sydney in 2014. He has over 20 years’ professional experience creating immersive and interactive systems in industry, academia and the creative arts, from creating computer games or immersive museum exhibitions, to developing astronaut training simulations at the European Space Agency. He has taught at the University of New South Wales, and more recently at the University of Würzburg in the field of media informatics. His creative works have been exhibited world-wide, in such venues as the ZKM, the Sydney Biennale, the Festival d’Avignon, the Seville Biennale of Contemporary Art, Chronos Centre Beijing, and the Roma Europa and Shanghai eArts festivals.

Elín Hansdóttir (b. 1980) works in numerous disciplines, including installation, sculpture, and photography. She often creates immersive in-situ installations that address one's own perception by moving through unfamiliar and seemingly out-of-place locations. In doing so, the installations offer an orientation system for self-reflection. This redesign of spaces vacillates between the physical and psychological effects of uncertainty, disorientation, sensory limitations, or visual illusions.

The Icelander's work revolves around confusion, the manipulation of the senses, and the concomitant deception of perception. In her installations, for example, Hansdóttir uses altered and reduced lighting conditions to create alien environments. The architectural system within which we usually move is manipulated and we ourselves are deprived of reliable constants. In this way, the artist subtly dislocates the spatial structure by means of dissolved contours and causes feelings of irritation, uncertainty, and disorientation.