Abstract

I will present recent and ongoing work in the RE Touch Lab on emerging haptic and robotic technologies. Modern computing and AI operate at extraordinary speed over vast, high-dimensional data spaces, but their agency in the physical world is sharply constrained. Haptic and robotic systems provide this agency, but with constrained physical output bandwidth: they provide few degrees of freedom, and operate at far slower speeds than is feasible in computational domains. I will describe ongoing research in my group that is directed at alleviating such bottlenecks and at enabling computational systems with greater physical agency. A logical extension of these ideas: computationally authorable physical reality, an unmapped possibility whose territory and implications are compelling, if unclear.

Bio

Visell is Associate Professor of Mechanical Engineering and MAT Affiliate Faculty at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Visell directs the RE Touch Lab, where they pursue fundamental and applied research on the future of interactive technologies, with emphasis on haptics, robotics, and electronics, including emerging opportunities in human-computer interaction, sensorimotor augmentation, soft robotics, and interaction in virtual reality.

Dr. Visell’s research has been generously supported through multiple awards from the National Science Foundation and other government agencies, tech industry companies, and philanthropic foundations. He has published more than 75 scientific works, and served as editor and author of two books on VR, including "Human Walking in Virtual Environments" (Springer Verlag, 2013). His work has received four awards and more than a dozen award nominations at prominent academic conferences. Dr. Visell is a recipient of the National Science Foundation CAREER Award (2018), of a Hellman Family Foundation Faculty Fellowship (2017), and a Google Faculty Research Award (2016).

Dr. Visell spent more than five years in industry working at technology companies. He was the digital signal processing developer at Ableton from 2001 to 2003, where he wrote algorithms that have shaped music produced by artists ranging from The Roots to Deadmau5. Previously, he was a research scientist working on speech recognition at Vocal Point (now part of Nuance, makers of the Siri voice assistant). Prior to that, he designed auditory displays for underwater sonar at ARL, Austin, Texas. Dr. Visell later worked in interactive art, design, and robotics research at the University of the Arts Zurich, at FoAM, Belgium, at the Interaction Design Institute Ivrea, and at the art-architecture-technology group Zero-Th, which he co-founded in 2004. His creative works and activities have been presented at cultural venues including Ircam / Centre Pompidou (Paris, France), SIGGRAPH, Phaeno Science Center (Wolfsburg, Germany), La Gaité Lyrique (Paris), the Oboro Center (Montreal), and the Biennale of Design St. Etienne (France).