Eric Godden| Portfolio

About Me

Hello! I'm a PhD student in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department at Queen's University supervised by Dr. Matthew Pan.

My research is at the intersection of human-robot interaction and virtual reality. I'm currently working on creating robotic systems that are capable of facilitating natural and realistic physical interaction within virtual environments, something that is extremely challenging for immersive systems.

I'm interested in safe and robust control strategies for robots operating within human-occupied workspaces that produce both tangible and socially meaningful outcomes.

Research & Publications

A collection of research projects completed during my PhD.

Robotic Characterization of Markerless Hand-Tracking on Meta Quest Pro and Quest 3 Virtual Reality Headsets

March 7, 2025

Eric Godden, William Steedman, & Matthew Pan

An evaluation methodology using a robotic manipulator to measure positional accuracy, jitter, and latency, providing a standardized characterization framework for markerless hand-tracking on Quest Pro and Quest 3.

Project page Paper

ETHOS: A Robotic Encountered-Type Haptic Display for Social Interaction in Virtual Reality

In Review

Eric Godden, Jacquie Groenewegen, & Matthew Pan

ETHOS (Encountered-Type Haptics for On-demand Social interaction) enables natural physical contact in VR for social interactions like handovers, fist bumps, and high-fives.

Project page Paper

Social-Physical Interactions with Virtual Characters: Evaluating the Impact of Physicality through Encountered-Type Haptics

In Review

Eric Godden, Jacquie Groenewegen, Michael Wheeler, & Matthew Pan

This work investigates how robot-mediated physicality influences the perception of social–physical interactions with virtual characters. We conducted a user study to examine how our encountered-type haptic display adds physicality to virtual character interactions and how this affects presence, realism, enjoyment, and connection metrics.

Project page Paper