I am Robby van Delden, a PhD candidate working on socially adaptive interactive playgrounds at Human Media Interaction - University of Twente. I focus on two main aspects: automatic measuring of social behavior with non-verbal synchrony and design of ambient entertainment installations. Although the main target group is small groups of children that are approximately seven to eleven years old, the research will also include others at times.

I was born in Leeuwarden in the Netherlands at 1986. After finishing high school in 2004, I studied Industrial Design Engineering at the Univeristy of Twente. For my bachelor's thesis I worked on lecterns and software on touchscreens for presentations. Fitting my interests for new technology, I continued studying industrial design engineering in the master's track Emergent Technology Design in 2008. During this I followed several courses of the Human Media Interaction master. This soon resulted in also doing a second master's in Human Media Interaction in 2009. In this period I worked in several projects: a handout-based interaction for slideshow presentation, big screen interfaces for creating overview in criminal networks, a human-supported face recognition system for retrieving persons in social networks and an interactive bar installation (Anemone). I did a combined master's thesis on tangible interaction for physical and occupational therapy of children with cerebral paresis, which I finished in 2011. This touched upon topics such as participatory design, interaction design for children and intrinsic motivation by games. It also resulted in a full paper for the ICEC 2012 conference.

After seven wonderful years of studying and research at the University of Twente, the hunger for gaining knowledge in interactive systems was still not satisfied. Thus, I started doing my PhD on movement synchrony in ambient interactive installations.

Outside my study I have had several jobs. For about four years, I gave supplemental teaching to high school children in mainly mathematics and natural sciences. I also worked in some small projects such as support for development and representation of Intelligent Lectern Systems at several Infocomm shows (the world's largest professional Audio-Visual tradeshow), creating an outline for intranet of Hameland, creating 3D-animations for Next Scan Technology and 3D models for publications of Wageningen University.