From Augmented Reality to Reconfigurable Reality: Towards Seamless Interactions through Both Visually and Physically Programmable Environments

Speaker: Ryo Suzuki , University of Calgary

Date: Tuesday, March 30, 2021

Time: 1:00 PM to 2:00 PM Note: all times are in the Eastern Time Zone

Public: Yes

Location: https://mit.zoom.us/j/96423770357

Event Type: Seminar

Room Description:

Host: Arvind Satyanarayan, CSAIL MIT

Contact: Cynthia Rosenthal, crosenth@csail.mit.edu

Relevant URL:

Speaker URL: http://ryosuzuki.org/)

Speaker Photo:

Reminders to: mitcsailhci@mit.edu, HCI-Seminar@lists.csail.edu, hcifac@lists.csail.mit.edu

Reminder Subject: TALK: From Augmented Reality to Reconfigurable Reality: Towards Seamless Interactions through Both Visually and Physically Programmable Environments

With the advent of immersive technologies, we can now more seamlessly blend our virtual and physical worlds than ever before. However, objects seen in AR/VR are currently only visual - the user cannot touch, feel, grasp, manipulate, and physically interact with virtual objects in the same way we do in the real world. The lack of this tangibility significantly limits our interaction and experience, but this is an inherent limitation of the current immersive technologies as AR/VR can only visually augment reality, remaining our physical world static and non-programmable. Then, how can we make our world programmable, not only through visually presented graphics but also through physically reconfigurable environments? In this talk, I explore the "reconfigurable reality", which aims to further blend our virtual and physical worlds through both visually and physically programmable environments. I illustrate this potential future by leveraging distributed swarm robots at different scales (from mm- to m-scale) which give us a means of physically displaying information, providing haptic sensations, reconfigure space, constructing graspable objects, and calmly supporting our everyday activities. I believe these robots will soon increasingly enter our everyday life and seamlessly weave themselves into the fabric of the living environment to make our physical world more adaptive, dynamic, and reconfigurable. This talk outlines how these collectively actuated interfaces can complement the current immersive technologies and illustrates how such ubiquitous robots can be a means of the future of human-computer interaction.

Ryo Suzuki is a new Assistant Professor in Computer Science at the University of Calgary. Prior to joining UCalgary in 2020, he was a Ph.D. student at the University of Colorado Boulder, where he was advised by Daniel Leithinger and Mark Gross. His research interest lies at the intersection between Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) and robotics. He explores how we can combine AR/VR and robotics technologies to make our environments programmable and further blend virtual and physical worlds. In the past 5 years, he has published more than fifteen peer-reviewed conference papers at top HCI and robotics venues, such as CHI, UIST, IROS, and received three awarded papers. Previously he also worked as research interns at Stanford University, UC Berkeley, the University of Tokyo, Adobe Research, and Microsoft Research.

Research Areas:
Human-Computer Interaction

Impact Areas:

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Created by Cynthia Rosenthal at Friday, March 12, 2021 at 4:32 PM.