CS547 Human-Computer Interaction Seminar   (Seminar on People, Computers, and Design)

Fridays 11:30am-12:30pm PT · Gates B3 · Open to the public
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Hrvoje Benko
Facebook Reality Labs
The Future of Mixed Reality Interactions
October 16, 2020

The vision of always-on Mixed Reality interfaces that can be used in a continuous fashion for an entire day, depends on solving many difficult problems including display technology, comfort, computing power, batteries, localization, tracking, and spatial understanding. However, solving all those will not bring us to a truly useful experience unless we also solve the fundamental problem of how to effectively interact in Mixed Reality. I believe that the solution to the MR interaction problem requires that we combine the approaches from interaction design, perceptual science, and machine learning, to yield truly novel and effective MR input and interactions. Such interfaces will need to be adaptive to the user context, believable, and computational in nature. We are at the exciting point in the technology development curve where there are still few universally accepted standards for MR input, which leaves a ton of opportunities for both researchers and practitioners.

Hrvoje Benko is a Director of Research Science at Facebook Reality Labs Research, working on novel interactions, devices and interfaces for Augmented and Virtual Reality. He leads a multi-disciplinary organization that includes scientists and engineers with expertise in HCI, computer vision, machine learning, AI, neuroscience, robotics and cognitive psychology. His interests span AR/VR, haptics, new input form factors and devices, as well as touch and freehand gestural input. He coauthored more than 60 scientific papers and journal articles and has served as General Chair (2014) and Program Chair (2012) of the ACM User Interface Systems and Technology conference. He also served as the Information Director and the Associate Editor for the TOCHI Journal, the premiere journal in the HCI field. Prior to his current role, he was a principal researcher at Microsoft Research and has contributed to products including Microsoft Touch Mouse, Surface, and Hololens. More detail can be found on his website: http://www.hrvojebenko.com/.