Scientific and clinical tasks are generally too long and too boring. Study participants and clinical patients aren’t motivated to perform when they have to click static images on grey backgrounds for twenty minutes. Accuracy in scientific testing is critical, but the world’s most accurate assessment task is useless if users and patients aren’t motivated to use it or perform at their best.
I’m a visual neuroscientist Ph.D. and accomplished game designer with more than a decade of experience creating “game-like” scientific and clinical tasks that are optimized to make data collection fun and engaging for users and patients.
I am a “full stack scientist” with expertise at every stage of the scientific/clinical pipeline — start to finish. I design experiments, develop software, write code, analyze data, and write papers.
Skilled video game designers know how to keep users engaged. Most of them aren’t also neuroscientists. I bring game design principles to scientific assessment to keep science engaging, and bring neuroscience back to game design to better understand how audience response to interactive experiences. In my spare time, I’ve made free games that have been viewed and downloaded millions of times and received widespread acclaim across the web.
If you have an idea for bettering how you bring your science to users or patients — or if you’d love such an idea to come along — then I’d love to work with you! I take all kinds of projects and design software for all kinds of audiences, both clinical and non-clinical.
Message or email me: scott@scottmooney.io
Read about some of my past achievements:
- Designed and implemented eye tracking games in Unity to measure vision in hundreds of children with brain injury, and performed extensive, detailed analysis to identify visual problems that no other test can detect in this population.
- Created an entirely new paradigm for rapidly measuring contrast sensitivity, an under-appreciated dimension of our vision that is often ignored because it has traditionally taken too long to test.
- Co-created an entirely new game engine and audio delivery system for psychophysical science in Python, which puts precise control in the hands of scientists while staying intuitive to use and skipping boilerplate setup.
- Implemented a difficult task for determining how users perceive 3D shapes — a famously difficult aspect of visual perception to measure — and determined how our perceptions of 3D shape, surface material, and image focus interact.
- Developed Python-based add-ons for Blender that let users import and export their desired file formats directly without needing to go through painful and lossy conversion.
Scott Mooney 