OUR ORIGIN

There is an old saying that necessity is the mother of all invention.  While technology, media, and consumer consumption habits continue to expand at blurring speeds, we saw an opportunity from the inevitability that comes with rapid expansion and adoption; namely, there would be far more questions than answers, and not nearly enough resources in these emerging markets to tackle them.  Ironically, academia is a place that has long had stockpiles of resources and plentiful expertise with answers to questions, but little availability of access to funding.  From necessity was born RealityScience, LLC.

OUR PASSION

Exploring the depths of human cognition, technological interaction and media consumption. Whether watching TV, playing games, exploring social websites, singing along to streaming services or fully immersed in another world, there is science behind it all.

MEET OUR TEAM

A unified team of academic superstars, versed in business, with a global understanding of bleeding-edge technologies and the research they were founded from.  Our experience is diverse and wide-ranging but all grounded in the fundamental rigors of science and traditional research. We have brain-power in spades.

Matthew Price, PhD

Dr. Matthew Price is an 18+ year veteran in the Digital Media field with expertise covering broadcast, interactive, social, and non-profit media as well as team and project management. His expertise stems from 20+ years of enterprise infrastructure and network experience and more than 14 years of creative media experience in video production/editing/content development for corporate, commercial, and non-profit projects. Dr. Price is a technical pioneer in Consumer Neuroscience Research and has spent the last 8 years using his combined technical and creative skills to develop, build, and refine AV workflows for Neurological Research. As the founder of RealityScience, LLC Dr. Price has built a team of research consultants dedicated to emergent technology, immersive media, and understanding media consumption and media literacy as a part of human-machine interactions. His Ph.D. is in Media Psychology with an emphasis in Cognitive Neuroscience and his dissertation, ” Calibrating Reality with a Mind’s Mirror Postulate: Towards a Comprehensive Schema for Measuring Personal Presence” focused on developing an objective framework for measuring presence in mediated experiences using multi-modal sensor fusion analysis. Matthew is a strong advocate for education, STEAM programs, social justice and human rights reform.

Tunisha Singleton, PhD

Dr. Tunisha Singleton is a Media Psychologist and a founding consulting partner at Reality Science, LLC. With over 10 years of entertainment experience blended across screenwriting, social media management and digital media marketing, Tunisha works to build synergy between branding and technology to create the best fan experiences possible. 

Using the tools of narrative and brand psychology, Dr. Singleton consults on various innovation projects in the verticals of sports, social advocacy, and emergent technology. Dr. Singleton’s current research focuses on how experiences are constructed in sports and the impact digital media has on fan identification and consumer behavior.

Dr. Singleton is an Adjunct Faculty member at Fielding Graduate University in the department of Media Psychology. As an advocate for media being a conduit to social change, Tunisha continues to work with cause marketing and military groups to boost their messages through storytelling and technology. For more information, you can find her on Twitter (@TSingletonSays), LinkedIn, and tunishajsingleton.com

Shane Pase, PhD

Dr. Shane Pase is a founding consulting partner at Reality Science, director of technology for Lotte Project, cofounder and executive producer at MediaX LLC new media technologies group, an award winning conceptual designer, and currently authoring the first book on the psychology of augmented reality.

Dr. Pase has over 19 years experience utilizing human behavior analytics to develop creative and outside-the-box solutions for both for-profit and non-profit corporations and small businesses. By combining theories from cognitive, neural, media, behavioral and social psychology, he is able to provide valuable insights into our experience with, and the effects of, media technologies to create the most immersive and effective media experiences.

Dr. Pase is a faculty member at Fielding Graduate University’s Media Psychology program teaching courses on media psychology, using media for social change, augmented reality and immersive technologies. Dr. Pase has presented internationally at such prestigious conferences as IEEE ISMAR, the Augmented World Expo, ACM/EEE WorldComp, National Social Science Association and American Psychological Association National Conventions, exploring the cognitive effects of augmented reality and immersive media, using new technologies for social change and disruption, and the ethics of new media technologies. You can find him on Twitter and Linkedin @shanepase and online at www.reality.science.

Julie Krohner

Julie Krohner is a social scientist and ethnographic researcher in emerging tech, healthcare and social impact.  Her mission is to help content creators make, and buyers look for, responsible, user-driven VR experiences.  It has never been more important to understand how users are engaging with a medium than in VR/MR.  Through on-site research she is side-by-side with users during and after an experience, obtaining immediate, actionable feedback that goes well beyond user interface findings.  These data points help inform design, and in turn helps developers and brand teams optimize prototypes to assure the content and flow of the experience are meaningful and relevant to users.    

Julie brings the highest quality, most in-depth research out of academic silos to the industry leaders and content creators who need it.  User research will soon be a cornerstone of immersive design best practices – the time is now to incorporate behavioral research into every product you make, or purchase.  Julie is a Diffusion of Innovations scholar who trained with Everett Rogers, the founder of the tech adoption curve.  She speaks and writes on immersive media as an empathy machine, and the diffusion/adoption of the technology.  

Sean Thoennes, PhD

Dr. Thoennes researches new Media & Technologies through a lens of personal and brand narratives. The focus is on agency, group dynamics and self-directed evolution, which gave rise to the multi-disciplinary field of Neo-Anthropogenic Psychology to reveal the impact exponential advances in technologies have on the human narrative. Evolved over time to make sense of the world around us, he brings decades-long experience with storytelling via electronic media in cost-conscious corporate & broadcast environments, as well as emerging immersive media such as Augmented Reality (AR), Virtual Reality (VR), and Mixed Reality (MR). Within Disney, he built a new business model that pioneered desktop video editing & using the Internet for a Webcast series that decreased costs, while increasing access companywide.

Dr. Thoennes’ case study findings published in 2015 on the 2012 campaign Barack Obama reddit IAmA support a crossover from the physical world to the online environment of broadly accepted group process theories. Implications suggest human-computer interactions are real and separate from physical interactions, which lends validity to the need for neo-anthropogenic psychology.

Specialties: Connection and cognition through new technologies including AI, AR, VR, MR, robotics and human longevity science. Conflict prediction and solutions in and through electronic media. Political, personal and corporate branding. Masters level instruction in psychology. All facets of creating & disseminating media narrative.

Gentry Lane, BA, BS, MFA

Gentry Lane is a serial social-impact entrepreneur and political strategist. Her virtual reality studio, TDO Productions, helps change-makers harness the power of VR and leverage it for social good. Formulated to inspire unprecedented levels of empathy & incite viewers into immediate action, TDO’s VR experiences are the solution to public complacency.

Her political data and civic analytics firm, Societas Analytics, helps public agencies and progressive candidates make better, data-driven decisions. Societas’ propriety algorithms and network science strategies empower clients to wield population-scale influence.

Ms. Lane brings not only big data and future tech expertise, but also subject sensitivity and practical ethics experience.

Ms. Lane sits on the BOD of the Los Angeles chapter of Ellevate, a nonprofit dedicated to helping business women succeed . She is also the executive director of the Rebel Action Network.

Ms. Lane speaks at technology and social impact conferences across the country and she blogs about ethics and trends in virtual reality (and her outrage at the Trump administration) on Medium @GentryLane 

Rafa Linera, PhD

Rafael E. Linera Rivera, Ph. D., (or ‘Rafa’ to most) was commissioned in 1997 as a Second Lieutenant in the Infantry Branch of the United States Military. Dr. Linera has served several assignments both domestically and abroad, including South Korea, Iraq, Mexico, Ecuador, and Afghanistan. Dr. Linera has served as Cyberspace Electromagnetic Activities & Influence Operations Chief in multiple Army and Joint-Combined Commands. Dr. Linera has earned numerous awards and decorations including the Bronze Star, Defense Meritorious Service Medal, the Army Meritorious Service Medal with two Oak Leaf Clusters, the Major General Robert A. McClure Bronze Medal, among others. Rafa holds a Ph.D. and M.A. in Psychology from Fielding Graduate University in Media Psychology, and a M.A. in Finance from Webster University, as well as a B.B.A. in Accounting from the University of Puerto Rico.

Michael French, PhD

Michael French, PhD is a graduate of Fielding Graduate University and has previously studied communications and economics with degrees from Pepperdine University. He has worked at CBS Sports, ESPN, NFL Network, and Fox Sports subsidiary – Palestra.com. He currently works in community relations for the City of Los Angeles, managing programs for at-risk youth.

Dr. French currently instructs at Mt. St. Mary’s University, where he is a professor of communications. Dr. French’s dissertation work extensively studied the 2008 presidential campaign as well as sports media. He has published several articles on both topics.