Prof. Dr. Julia Chatain

Assistenzprofessorin

Interdisciplinary researcher in educational technologies, seeking to understand how technology should be designed to help students grasp abstract concepts.

Prof. Dr Julia Chatain is an Assistant Professor for Learning Technologies and Distance Education at UniDistance Suisse. After working as a software engineer in the fields of XR and game technologies, she completed her Doctorate of Science “Embodied Interaction in Virtual Reality for Grounding Mathematics” from the Computer Science department of ETH Zurich in 2023, for which she was awarded the ETH Medal for “Outstanding Dissertation.” She then continued her academic career as a Senior Scientist at the Singapore-ETH Center, where she designed an international research program on Future Embodied Learning Technologies (FELT). Part of her research is funded by the Jacobs Foundation "Young Scholar" grant which she obtained for the project "Achieving Adaptive Mathematics Knowledge through Embodied Causal Learning." She started her position as Assistant Professor at UniDistance in 2026.

Research focus

Julia Chatain’s research focuses on

understanding what resources learners need when learning abstract concepts and why,
how to design technological solutions to enable access to these resources.

In this context, much of her research has explored how humans use their bodies when reflecting on mathematical problems, and how to leverage Virtual Reality technology to enable meaningful and effective bodily movements during learning.

Forschungsgruppen

Chair for Holistic Learning Experiences (CHLX)

Concreteness and Abstraction in Mathematics Education: A Taxonomy of the Semantic Landscape

2025-11 | Educational Psychology Review

DOI: 10.1007/s10648-025-10073-9

Julia Chatain
Charlotte Müller
Keny Chatain
Leon Calabrese
Manu Kapur

Journal article Peer-reviewed

Applying Augmented Reality to Convey Medical Knowledge on Osteoclasts to Users of a Serious Game: Vignette Experiment

2025-06 | JMIR Serious Games

DOI: 10.2196/64751

Jascha Grübel
Julia Chatain
Claudio Schmid
Violaine Fayolle
Fabio Zünd
Reinhard Gruber
Bernd Stadlinger

Journal article Peer-reviewed

HistoLab VR: A User Elicitation Study Exploring the Potential of Virtual Reality Game-based Learning for Hazard Awareness

2024-10

DOI: 10.1145/3641825.3687723

Robin Timon Hänni
Tiffany Luong
Julia Chatain
Felix Mangold
Holger Dressel
Christian Holz

Conference paper Peer-reviewed

Applying Augmented Reality to Convey Medical Knowledge On Osteoclasts: A User Study (Preprint)

2024-07

DOI: 10.2196/preprints.64751

Jascha Grübel
Julia Chatain
Claudio Schmid
Violaine Fayolle
Fabio Zünd
Reinhard Gruber
Bernd Stadlinger

preprint

Designing for Embodied Sense-making of Mathematics: Perspectives on Directed and Spontaneous Bodily Actions

2024-06

DOI: 10.1145/3643834.3661571

Julia Chatain
Venera Gashaj
Bibin Muttappillil
Robert W. Sumner
Manu Kapur

Conference paper Peer-reviewed

Three Perspectives on Embodied Learning in Virtual Reality: Opportunities for Interaction Design

2023-04

DOI: 10.1145/3544549.3585805

Julia Chatain
Manu Kapur
Robert W. Sumner

Conference paper Peer-reviewed

Embodied Interaction in Virtual Reality for Grounding Mathematics

2023-02

DOI: 10.3929/ETHZ-B-000613388

dissertation-thesis

Grounding Graph Theory in Embodied Concreteness with Virtual Reality

2023-02

DOI: 10.1145/3569009.3572733

Julia Chatain
Rudolf Varga
Violaine Fayolle
Manu Kapur
Robert W. Sumner

Conference paper Peer-reviewed

Grasping Derivatives: Teaching Mathematics through Embodied Interactions using Tablets and Virtual Reality

2022-06 | Interaction Design and Children

DOI: 10.1145/3501712.3529748

Conference paper Peer-reviewed

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to Fused Twins: A Review of Access to Digital Twins In Situ in Smart Cities

2022-05 | Remote Sensing

DOI: 10.3390/rs14133095

Jascha Grübel
Tyler Thrash
Leonel Aguilar
Michal Gath-Morad
Julia Chatain
Robert W. Sumner
Christoph Hölscher
Victor R. Schinazi

Journal article Peer-reviewed

Mathematics Input for Educational Applications in Virtual Reality

2020-12 | ICAT-EGVE 2021 - International Conference on Artificial Reality and Telexistence and Eurographics Symposium on Virtual Environments

DOI: 10.2312/EGVE.20211324

Journal article Peer-reviewed

DigiGlo

2020-11 | Proceedings of the Annual Symposium on Computer-Human Interaction in Play

DOI: 10.1145/3410404.3414260

Conference paper Peer-reviewed

A Creative Game Design and Programming App

2019-10 | Motion, Interaction and Games

DOI: 10.1145/3359566.3360056

Conference paper Peer-reviewed

FlyMap

2018-06 | Proceedings of the 7th ACM International Symposium on Pervasive Displays

DOI: 10.1145/3205873.3205877

Conference paper Peer-reviewed

SyMAPse: Design and Evaluation of an Augmented Reality Map

2015-12

Other

Exploring input modalities for interacting with augmented paper maps

2015-10 | Proceedings of the 27th Conference on l'Interaction Homme-Machine

DOI: 10.1145/2820619.2825002

Conference paper Peer-reviewed

SyMAPse: Augmented Interactive Maps for Subjective Expression

2015-08

supervised-student-publication

Lehre

M02	Computer Science for AI Master of Science in Artificial Intelligence Computer Science for AI Master of Science in Artificial Intelligence Computer Science for AI Master of Science in Artificial Intelligence

Funktionen an der FernUni Schweiz

Fakultät Mathematik und Informatik

Assistenzprofessorin

Chair for Holistic Learning Experiences (CHLX)

Assistenzprofessorin

Fakultätskollegium Mathematik und Informatik

Assistenzprofessorin

Prof. Dr. Julia Chatain

Links

Research focus

Chair for Holistic Learning Experiences (CHLX)

Lehre

Funktionen an der FernUni Schweiz

Fakultät Mathematik und Informatik

Chair for Holistic Learning Experiences (CHLX)

Fakultätskollegium Mathematik und Informatik