Touché gets Best Paper Award at CHI 2012.

Touché project was presented at the ACM CHI 2012 conference in Austin in early May and received Best Paper Award. The paper can be downloaded from here.

SideBySide wins top awards at UIST’11.

We presented a paper on SideBySide project at the ACM UIST 2011 conference in Santa-Barbara and it won both Best Paper and Best Demo awards!

The paper can be accessed here.

Radio interviews on Surround Haptics.

Several national and local radio stations talked to me about Surround Hapics project that we presented at the Siggraph 2011 Emerging Technology exhibition.

Voice of America “Science World” with Rick Pantaleo ran a substantial interview about our technology. I also talked briefly with Marketplace Tech Report from American Public Media and, finally, one of the oldest radio stations in Pittsburgh KQV (stands for “Kings of Quaker Valley”) asked few questions about Surround Haptics. Links to interviews are below:

• Voice of America >>
• Market Place Tech Report / American Public Media (after 3 min mark) >>
• KQV >>

Surround Haptics at SIGGRAPH 2011.

Surround Haptics project was accepted for SIGGRAPH 2011 Emerging Technologies exhibition in Vancouver, August 7 to 11 2011. The title of our SIGGRAPH exhibition is “Surround Haptics: Sending Shivers Down Your Spine” [PDF].

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We use Surround Haptics technology to create an immersive, videotactile gaming environments that delivers detailed tactile sensations tightly synchronized with in-game events. A high-intensity driving game “Split/Second” was enhanced with tactile sensations for collisions, road imperfections, tire traction, acceleration and braking, car damage, etc. BlackRock Studio, the developer of the game and one of the Disney in-house game studios, collaborated with us on this project.

We designed a modular tactile platform that consists of a custom plywood chair, specifically designed for tactile feedback applications,  softpads with an embedded tactile grid, and a wireless controller implementing Surround Haptifcs algorithm. A tactile chair was designed and produced by Prof. Mark Baskinger, Jason May, Natalia Oblonsky and Luke Martin, all from School of Design, CMU.

Presenting at World Haptics 2011, Istanbul.

I and Ali Israr went to Instanbul to participate in World Haptics Conference  (WHC 2011), a major venue for all things haptics. We had several things to present there.

First, I gave an invited talk “Tactile touch panels: Why it is hard and what is in the future?” (PDF) at one of the conference  workshops. I talked about lessons I learned from developing tactile feedback for Sony RM-NX7000 universal remote controller – first consumer electronics product with tactile feedback on touch screen.

Ali Israr presented our joint paper “Control Space of Apparent Haptic Motion” (PDF). Talks at WHC 2011 were very competitive with acceptance rate of 16.5% from the total number of submissions.

Finally, we demonstrated TeslaTouch project in the demo session as shown on a photo above.

Istanbul was great location for the conference. It is a beautiful city with a lot of history, everything was well organized and it was the very first conference that I attended where we had a belly dancer at the conference dinner.

Presenting at CHI 2011 Conference.

We presented several new projects from Interaction Group, Disney Research, Pittsburgh at CHI 2011 conference on May 7-12 in Vancouver, Canada:

• MotionBeam project explores the use of hand-held projectors as a new gaming platform and proposes a set of interaction design principles that could be used to build effective mobile projector games. A full paper describing Motion Beam project can be downloaded from here.
• TactileBrush project is a part of broader research direction focused on creating high-resolution tactile displays using low-resolution arrays of tactile actuators. We investigate and exploit a number of tactile illusions to “fill” the space in-between actuators. A full paper can be accessed here.
• TeslaTouch was presented in demonstration section of the conference, where we showed a design of tactile display for blind based on TeslaTouch.

I will describe each project in more details in later posts.

Presenting at UIST 2010 conference.

TeslaTouch project was presented at the conference in New York on October 6, 2010. This is me and Olivier Bau answering questions after the talk.

This was the very first research project by Interaction Group at Disney Research Pittsburgh that was publicly presented. It was presented at UIST 2010 conference, one of the most prestigious interface technology conferences. I will post some details about TeslaTouch project later on this blog.

Thanks to Fabian Hemmert for taking the above photograph!

12Pixels paper gets an award at Pervasive 2010.

A paper on 12Pixels project was presented at Pervasive 2010 Conference in Helsinki.

A title of the paper was “12Pixels: Exploring Social Drawing on Mobile Phones” and the entire paper can be downloaded from here.

The paper was presented in Helsinki by Karl Willis and he did an excellent job presenting it. In fact he received a Best Presentation Award! Unfortunately, I had to stay in Pittsburgh and could not attend the conference and see his presentation.

Presenting our work at CHI 2010 conference.

I was in Atlanta for  ACM CHI 2010 conference in the middle of April. CHI is considered to be one of the major conferences on human-computer interaction design and technologies, though it also has a strong bend on evaluation, user studies, ethnographic observations and things like that.

I went to CHI to present some of our very recent projects at the late-breaking results session, including designing novel interaction experiences using mobile projectors, development of haptic chair that we want to use for games and attractions and new sensor design based on resonant frequency tuning. Papers are available from my publications page.

TEI 2010 Conference in MIT Media Lab.

On  January 25 – 27 I attended TEI 2010 Conference that took place in MIT Media Lab in Boston. “TEI” stands for “Tangible and Embedded Interaction” and the conference covers tangible interfaces, physical computing, etc. I was involved in the TEI Graduate Student Consortium (GSC).

GSC is a part of the conference where graduate students from all over the world can submit their research projects and then, when they come to the conference, they are supposed to discuss it with “mentors”, e.g. more experienced researchers from academia and industry. I was one of those mentors and was supposed to guide students by giving them some profound, live-altering advices. I am not sure if that worked out very well, but it was an interesting experience.

The main TEI conference took place in the new MIT Media Lab building which was very impressive. What was even more impressive is that it was completed right in the middle of this giant financial crisis gripping the entire world.