User Researcher · Mixed Reality & Spatial Audio
I study how people hear, see and feel the technology they wear.
I'm Katrina, a Washington-based researcher who has run studies for Microsoft's Mixed Reality team and Meta Reality Labs — from soldier field tests of an AR headset to spatial-audio calls on Ray-Ban Meta glasses. I design the study, run the room, and turn what people do into decisions teams can act on.
- Microsoft Mixed Reality
- Meta Reality Labs
- Quest 3
- Ray-Ban Meta
- IVAS
In the anechoic chamber — the quietest room I've worked in.
11
published case studies, each taken from protocol to findings
30
participant pairs recruited, moderated and behavior-coded in one experiment
80%+
soldier satisfaction benchmark set for the IVAS prototype
Qual + Quant
interviews and thematic analysis alongside A/B tests, t-tests and segmentation
Selected work
The questions I've helped answer.
Each case study covers the question, my role, the method and what changed because of it.
Meta Reality Labs
Orchestrating a 1,000-Hour Speech Corpus
Led end-to-end operations for a 1,000-session wearable speech study across four sites, driving mid-flight infrastructure fixes and protocol standardizations that rescued data quality.
Read the case study →
Meta Reality Labs
Standardizing Onboarding and Documentation for Large-Scale Ops
Transformed siloed operational knowledge into a repeatable onboarding pipeline, scaling the RA team to twelve while standardizing cross-site documentation.
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Meta Reality Labs
Mitigating Hardware Failures in AR Data Collection
Diagnosed and resolved critical tethering and data-loss failure points during an early-stage AR hardware data collection project by bridging engineering constraints and user realities.
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Meta Reality Labs
Synthesizing 1,000 Hours of Operational Data Into Strategy
Converted an 18-week operational log into a defensible team retrospective, featuring custom data visuals, metric standardization, and audience-scoped reporting.
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Meta Reality Labs
Designing a Cocktail Party for Fifty Strangers Under IRB
Designed a compliant social engagement system for a 50-person simulated mixer under rigid IRB constraints, turning potential silence into a high-yield acoustic dataset.
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Microsoft · Mixed Reality
Quantifying Soldier Experience with IVAS
Sole analyst on a two-week field test. I normalized inconsistent survey scales into comparable percentiles and found a counter-intuitive result: non-leaders were more likely to recommend the device. Findings went to the Directors of UX Research and Systems Engineering.
Read the case study →
Meta Reality Labs
Spatial Sound on Ray-Ban Meta: UX Insights
I designed a "tidy the room" task so people moved naturally during calls. The result redirected the roadmap: users wanted visual context, not subtler audio.
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Meta Reality Labs
Beyond Distance: Spatial Audio & Social Bonds
A within-subjects experiment with 30 pairs that gave Meta's audio team its first validated measure of social connectedness.
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Meta Reality Labs
Room Acoustics & Realism: A User Study
Moderated preference studies on Quest 3 rating realism and plausibility. Users consistently chose the enhanced algorithm, validating the audio team's direction.
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Microsoft · Mixed Reality
AR Headsets: Taming Motion Blur for Visual Comfort
Wrote the protocol for a blinded A/B study measured with the Simulator Sickness Questionnaire, and helped build a night-light lab with an obstacle course.
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Meta Reality Labs
Training AI for Room Acoustics
Recorded the female voice dataset across rooms and devices to train Meta AI's room-acoustic detection model.
Read the case study →How I work
From a blank protocol to a decision.
01
Design the study
Protocols, hypotheses and tasks that get people behaving naturally — even in a lab built to simulate night-time missions.
A/B tests · within-subjects experiments · heuristic evaluation · survey design
02
Run the room
Recruiting, scheduling, moderating and troubleshooting prototypes so every session is safe, welcoming and consistent.
Moderation · focus groups · biometric data collection · Qualtrics
03
Find the signal
Turning messy, sometimes confidential data into clear findings leaders use to set priorities — including the ones nobody expected.
Descriptive stats · t-tests · segmentation · thematic analysis · behavioral coding
"Research includes failures, and these are often the richest learning opportunities."
— On the Spatial Calling study, which helped the team reallocate resources to features users actually wanted
Off the clock
Proud dog parent, puzzle finisher, dad-joke collector.
Most weekends start at the dog park with Otis, my pug who fetches with more heart than athletic ability, and Luna, my introverted lab. Then it's home with a sci-fi novel or a thriller and a cup of hot cocoa.
I also sweat through hot yoga and hunt down new dessert spots. Ask me a "Would You Rather" — I always have one ready. The same curiosity is why I love research: I want to know what makes people tick.
- 🐶 Otis & Luna
- 🧩 Jigsaw puzzles
- 📚 Sci-fi & thrillers
- 🔥 Hot yoga
- 🍰 Dessert scouting
Meet KatrinaBot
Can't wait for a reply? Ask the virtual me.
KatrinaBot is an AI version of me, trained on my résumé, my research history and my personality. Ask it about a study, what I'd bring to your team, or challenge it to a round of Would You Rather.
Let's talk
Hiring a user researcher for XR, audio or wearables?
I'd love to hear what you're building. Send a note and I'll reply personally.
© Katrina Pirie · Washington