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In 1992 I first read Neal Stephenson’s novel Snow Crash. I was influenced by many things in that book, but one thing that struck me in particular was the way the Metaverse (a term Stephenson coined for that novel) relied on good facial expression. In the story, Juanita, an expert on facial expression, implements the…

When I was a kid, I read about a story written by an Italian poet. It was about a kid stepping into a country where everybody has to spoke lies only everyday. While reading this story, I was thinking, “How can I come up with a sentence that is always a lie?” After a few…

Over the last three years, through the course of the pandemic, we have made various changes to how we operate. We have moved from going to work or class everyday in person to a completely remote approach where we hardly meet in person to get something done. Zoom along with the associated suite of tools…

This is the year of 2022 AD, which is the year of 3 after COVID, is the universe meta enough? The memory of COVID is still fresh, while the impact of COVID is fading out from our life. When we look back to the past 3 years, nothing has really changed, except remote meeting becomes…

As we emerge from the experiences from the past few years, I think that we have learned (or re-discovered) the value of human connection. There is a renewed interest in supporting those connections better. You can see that interest represented everywhere: definitely in the flood of research coming from academia and industry. Collectively, we are…

I have been playing with the first audio sunglasses from Bose, Bose Frames. With two speakers integrated separately into the temples sitting in front of the ears, Bose Frames beam music right into your ears and provide open-air audio experience with nothing in or on the ears. One of the reasons I wanted to play…

One of the goals of our lab is to allow people in a shared mixed reality to collaborate together in manipulation of objects. Those objects might be real solid physical objects, or they might virtual objects, which exist only in our collective visual and auditory perception. One challenge is to create a seamless way of…

I have been working on a platform combined with HTC Vive and pressure-sensing technologies to assess human balance in the walking paradigm. With the two new Vive trackers, we can now track foot position and orientation. Vive base stations can track the Vive trackers, so the setup only requires two Vive trackers mounted on the…

In the next few years SmartPhones will be augmented, and eventually replaced, by wearables. When that happens, we will be able to see and hear digital information floating in the air between and around us, even in casual conversation. This will have profound effects on everything from work to education to entertainment to social interaction.…