Heiko Hecht studied psychology and philosophy at the universities of Trier, Germany, and Virginia, USA. He has held positions at the University of Munich, NASA Ames Research Center, Universität Bielefeld, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He currently holds the chair of Experimental Psychology at the Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz, Germany. He has published over 100 journal articles and edited several books in the domains of picture perception and virtual reality, artificial gravity, time-to-contact estimation, and intuitive physics.