Prof Dr Fridolin Wild

Professional biography

Prof Wild has published over 150 peer-reviewed papers, journal articles, and book chapters, and seven books. His €2.7m funded project 'Wearable Experience for Knowledge Intensive Training (WEKIT)' investigated AR technology supporting astronauts, doctors, and engineers with immersive training. His technical leadership of the €3.9m ARETE project on building a Europe-wide competitive ecosystem for XR interactive education won the Standards+Innovation award 2022 of CEN/Cenelec. He led the Augmented Reality technology roadmap in Product Assurance and Safety of the European Space Agency (ESA-ESTEC).

As professor for AR/VR at the Open University and Director of the Research Programme ‘Performance Augmentation’, he is supervising several PhD students, also at other Universities in the UK and in Sweden. He is part of the management team and steering group of the University’s OpenXR studios where, with £5.8M from the Office for Students, he is building new production facilities to support future XR projects.

He chairs standards development of an AR content model in the IEEE, and is lead technologist on its open-source reference implementation, MirageXR, an authoring tool, viewer, and repository for immersive learning in the Moodle community. He was 2009-12 General Scientific Manager of the STELLAR network of excellence in technology-enhanced learning, leading a global network on agenda setting for the wider research community, and supporting it in strategic, researcher, next generation, and community-level capacity building, including promoting the adoption of open and engaged research practice.

Prof Wild is academic lead of an EdTech accelerator, supporting start-ups with rapid growth potential. He is the maintainer of the task view for natural language processing of the R project, the freely available language and environment for statistical computing and graphics.

With his research and teaching, Prof Wild seeks to close the dissociative gap between abstract knowledge and its practical application, devising radically new forms of linking directly from knowing something ‘in principle’ to applying that knowledge ‘in practice’ and speeding its refinement and integration into polished performance.

Prof Wild is and has been leading numerous EU, European Space Agency, nationally, and privately funded research projects, including ARIDLL, ERADEX, ARETE, LAAR, AR-for-EU, WEKIT, TCBL, ARPASS, Tellme, TELmap, cRunch, Stellar, Role, LTfLL, iCamp, and Prolearn. Prof Wild is a trust-appointed Local Governor of Oxford Spires Academy.

From 2015 to 2020, Fridolin was Senior Research Fellow at Oxford Brookes University. From 2009 to 2016, he was at the Knowledge Media Institute of the OU. Fridolin also worked as a researcher at the Vienna University of Economics and Business in Austria from 2004 to 2009. He studied at the University of Regensburg, Germany, with extra-murals at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich and the University of Hildesheim.