About

I'm Dalton Salvo. I'm a UX and human-factors researcher who specializes in eye tracking, and I build the virtual environments I study. My work combines eye tracking and other physiological measures with study design, statistics and game-engine development.

From 2021 to 2025 I was lead researcher and developer for the UC Irvine Virtual Reality Lab in the Department of Biomedical Engineering. I ran its eye-tracking and physiological studies, built the multiplayer learning environment used in BME 179, and led teams of undergraduate, master's and medical students producing clinical VR content.

I earned my PhD at UC Irvine in 2026. My dissertation, On Hacking the Soul, asks what video games and virtual worlds do to the people inside them. It reads two games closely, Red Dead Redemption 2 on a monitor and Gnomes & Goblins in VR, and tests its claims with a physiological experiment and a deployed virtual learning environment.

Before that, I taught writing and rhetoric for six years at UC Irvine and San Diego State, including a research-writing course built around video games.

• Research: within-subject experimental design, multimodal physiological data, survey design and qualitative coding, permutation statistics for small samples, usability evaluation
• Eye tracking: headset eye tracking, webcam and phone-camera gaze estimation, gaze-overlay video and heatmaps, cross-device clock synchronization
• Development: Unreal Engine 5 (C++ and Blueprints), AWS (GameLift, EC2, S3, CloudFront), macOS and Windows packaging, Swift and ARKit, Python, MATLAB
• Media: 360° and first-person video production, DaVinci Resolve

• King, C. E., K. Diec, and D. Salvo. "Scalable Virtual Reality Global Clinical Immersion for Culturally Responsive Engineering Design Skills." Proceedings of the 2025 ASEE Pacific Southwest Conference, 2025.
• King, C. E., and D. Salvo. "Phenomenological Evaluation of an Undergraduate Clinical Needs Finding Skills Through a Virtual Reality Clinical Immersion Platform." Biomedical Engineering Education 4 (2024): 381–397. doi:10.1007/s43683-024-00139-5
• King, C. E., M. Lo, M. Das, and D. Salvo. "Assessment of Student Engagement in Virtual Reality Clinical Immersion Environments through Eye Tracking." Proceedings of the 2024 ASEE Pacific Southwest Conference, 2024.
• King, C. E., K. R. Feeney, Q. Tang, M. Das, and D. Salvo. "Work in Progress: Physiological Assessment of Learning in a Virtual Reality Clinical Immersion Environment." Proceedings of the 2023 ASEE Annual Conference, 2023.Best BME Division Work in Progress Award
• King, C., J. Wang, S. Rao, R. Sreedasyam, A. Kulkarni, S. Braich, I. Sharma, and D. Salvo. "Work in Progress: Development of Virtual Reality Platform for Unmet Clinical Needs Finding in Undergraduate Biomedical Engineering Design Programs." 2022 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition, 2022. ASEE PEERFinalist, Best Work in Progress Paper

In the news: "Dalton Salvo sees simulated classrooms as the future," UCI News, March 2021.

• PhD, English (Critical Theory & Rhetoric), University of California, Irvine, 2026
• MA, English Literature, University of California, Irvine, 2019
• MA, Rhetoric & Writing Studies, San Diego State University, 2017
• MSc, English Literature & Society, University of Edinburgh, 2013
• BA, English Literature, University of San Diego, 2012

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