Daniel Jiménez Navarro after successfully defending his thesis. Photo: MPI-INF/ Philipp Zapf-Schramm
On Monday, 21 September 2026 Daniel Jiménez Navarro defended his thesis with the title: “Active Modulation of Audio-Visual Perception to Enhance Human Performance and Experience in Immersive Environments”. Since March 2023 he was PhD student in Computer Science at Saarland University in Saarbrücken and the Max Planck Institute for Informatics under the supervision of Prof. Karol Myszkowski and Prof. Hans-Peter Seidel, head of Computer Graphics department. The doctoral degree is awarded by Saarland University.
Abstract of the thesis:
Human perception determines how sensory information from the external world is interpreted and processed by the brain. Computer graphics techniques and recent advances in display hardware increasingly exploit the limitations of human perceptual systems to generate perceptually compelling content while reducing computational requirements, as exemplified by foveated rendering approaches. In immersive experiences, visual content is delivered through stereoscopic displays alongside omnidirectional spatial audio.
This dissertation investigates how our perceptual systems prioritize and integrate information gathered from multiple sensory inputs, examining cases where one modality is weighted more heavily than another, or where competing signals within the same modality are differentially weighted. Ultimately, the findings presented in this dissertation advance the understanding of multisensory perception, including audiovisual interaction and visual dominance, with a clear application-driven focus on enhancing visual performance and reducing computational requirements.
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