Keynote - Dr. Hrvoje Benko

The vision of always-on AR (and VR) 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, I believe that solving all those will not bring us to a truly useful experience unless we also enable effective AR interactions. Only by solving the AR interaction puzzle will the person using AR technology be able to do something useful, do it easily, and do it well. In this talk, I’ll share some of the insights I’ve acquired over the years on what are the most promising approaches for enabling effective AR input as well as what are the key emerging trends that still need a lot of research attention.

Hrvoje Benko is a Research Science Manager at Facebook Reality Labs, working on creating novel interactions, devices and interfaces for augmented and virtual reality. Prior to his current role, he was a principal researcher at Microsoft Research. His interests span AR/VR, interactive projection mapping, 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 his field. Some of his widely publicized interactive projects include IllumiRoom, RoomAlive, OmniTouch and MirageTable.