Olga completed her MArch at the School of Architecture of the National Technical University of Athens (NTUA) in 2012. After a professional sprint in architecture, she continued her studies with an MSc in "Geoinformatics" also at NTUA in 2016, where she focused on photogrammetry and stereoscopy. She moved to Glasgow, Scotland, in 2018 to attend the interdisciplinary MSc programme "Serious Games & Virtual Reality" of the Glasgow School of Art, which she completed with Distinction. This threshold opened up interaction design, game design and immersive technologies, which became the foundations for all her subsequent work.

From 2020-2022 she worked as a researcher at the Glasgow School of Art and at Heriot-Watt University for the UKRI-funded project SECRIOUS, exploring game-based learning methods for cybersecurity. She collaborated with the US-based, non-profit organisation Studio Bahia for the promotion of low-cost VR for mental health support, with C-Brain lab at Stanford University for cognitive health research using VR, and with Cyprus Institute on a cultural heritage immersive application for the UNESCO World Heritage monument of Choirokoitia.

Since 2022 she has been working with Gruppo Maggioli as a research associate and XR developer in EU-funded research projects and is responsible for the AR Theatre use case of the EU-funded VoxReality project.

In 2023, she became a PhD candidate at the Department of Informatics and Telecommunications of the University of Athens, focusing on Human-Computer Interaction in immersive environments, under the supervision of Dr. Maria Roussou. She is currently investigating the cognitive and affective influences of voice-based interactions in immersive experiences, and is offering teaching assistance in the postgraduate course "Interactive Systems".  

In 2024, alongside fellow PhD students and collaborators -Christina Chrysanthopoulou and Renia Papathanasiou- she founded the non-profit company “Otter Space XR” for the use of XR for social change.  

In her free time, she is volunteering mentorship on interactive application development using the Unity game engine for the Game Developer Association of Greece.


∵ Expertise
Serious game research, design & development
Immersive experience research, design & development

∵ Research
Scopus: 57388719700
ORCID: 0000-0002-9881-9991

∵ Business 
LinkedIn: olga-chatzif0ti

∵  Games
Itch.io: https://noha-morte.itch.io/