MIT

Graduate Student, Media Arts and Sciences

PhD candidate and Research Assistant

About

Through an interdisciplinary lens that brings together engineering, art, cognitive science, and healthcare, I explore the anthropomorphic nature of hybrid physical/digital objects and their promise to be catalysts towards unforeseen discoveries. I design objects to offer anima and perspective: from the haptic jacket that an autistic patient wears to express to the doctor what it means to be sensory defensive, to the electromagnetic field detector bracelet that transforms invisible information into visible data for a feeling of empowerment, or an environment where instead of you taking care of your avatar in massive online games, your avatar turns around and takes care of your biological needs.

This trend in designing objects with perspectives led me to a fundamental quest in exploring the simplicity of tangible and gestural object interaction combined with the flexibility of digital systems.

For my PhD, I define the framework, Gesture Object Interaction, expanding on the fields of Tangible User Interaction and Gesture Recognition. I generated a suite of automatic film assembly tools accessible to diverse users. The tools that I designed allow for capture, editing and performing to be completely indistinguishable from one another. Gestures integrated with objects become a coherent interface on top of natural play. I built a distributed, modular camera environment and gesture interaction to control that environment. The goal of these technologies is to motivate children to take new visual and narrative perspectives, engendering social growth.

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