purnendu

ATLAS PhD Student Purnendu Presents at World Haptics Conference

Anonymous — Thu, 07 Sep 2023 20:53:59 +0000

ATLAS PhD Student Purnendu Presents at World Haptics Conference Anonymous (not verified) Thu, 09/07/2023 - 14:53

Michael Kwolek

ATLAS PhD student, Purnendu, presented research at the recent IEEE World Haptics Conference in Delft, Netherlands. Haptics is the science of touch, and this gathering is billed as “the premier international conference covering all aspects of haptics including the fundamental scientific findings, technological developments, algorithms and applications.”

Purnendu developed a wearable electrohydraulic fingertip interface during an internship at Meta’s Reality Labs, with the aim to improve how we perceive and use physical touch in virtual and augmented reality environments. Meta created Reality Labs to “bring together the brightest cross-disciplinary minds in one place to deliver our mission: build tools that help people feel connected, anytime, anywhere.”

[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sHb_Jq3AXyw]

We connected with Purnendu to hear more details on his haptics work and the conference. Take a look:

What was the initial inspiration behind this research?

The inspiration behind this research was to be able to augment human fingertips with a reliable sense of 'artificial touch' for the Metaverse (Augmented Reality/Virtual Reality Environments). Fingertips are one of the most sensitive regions of human skin and to be able to provide them with desirable tactile cues is an open problem. The most promising pathway is attaching a high density of multimodal actuators with capabilities to render a variety of forces (normal/shear) as well as vibrations.

This research leveraged my prior research on soft electrohydraulic actuators (happened at ATLAS) to develop a high resolution fingertip wearable multimodal haptic interface consisting of 16 individual actuators that can render high intensity pressure as well as a wide range of vibrations (within an area of 1 cm sq).

What was it like to work at Meta?

Meta Reality Labs is an amazing workplace. The realization that many of these research projects happening around me will form the foundation of the products that will come out in the next 5-10 years was thrilling. The depth as well as the breadth of the work happening there is mind boggling. But not only the research being performed was cutting edge, the team and people were really nice. Reality Labs is filled with folks who are super smart, skilled, motivated, and above all very kind. I had a great time working there.

How was your experience presenting at the conference?

IEEE World Haptics Conference is a premiere venue for the haptics community to present, discuss, and demonstrate research ideas and prototypes. My experience was beyond expectation. My presentation went really well; it was an instant hit and a lot of people reached out to me afterwards. The other presentations and demos were quite good (both from industry partners as well as academic labs). The highlight for me was to get to interact closely with the most senior researchers in the haptics community.

How has this research shaped your ongoing work as a PhD student in ATLAS?

This research has been along the lines of my PhD work at ATLAS and will be included in my dissertation. It had origins in the previous research I performed at ATLAS on soft electrohydraulic actuators. It helped me orient more towards my thesis work on steering soft materials with high-intensity electric fields.

Publication Details

Fingertip Wearable High-resolution Electrohydraulic Interface for Multimodal Haptics
Purnendu, Jess Hartcher‑O’Brien, Vatsal Mehta, Nicholas Colonnese, Aakar Gupta, Carson Bruns, Priyanshu Agarwal

Fingertips are one of the most sensitive regions of the human body and provide a means to dexterously interact with the physical world. To recreate this sense of physical touch in a virtual or augmented reality (VR/AR), high-resolution haptic interfaces that can render rich tactile information are needed. In this paper, we present a wearable electrohydraulic haptic interface that can produce high-fidelity multimodal haptic feedback at the fingertips. This novel hardware can generate high-intensity fine tactile pressure (up to 34 kPa) as well as a wide range of vibrations (up to 700 Hz) through 16 individually controlled electrohydraulic bubble actuators. To achieve such a high intensity multimodal haptic feedback at such a high density (16 bubbles/cm2) at the fingertip using an electrohydraulic haptic interface , we integrated a stretchable substrate with a novel dielectric film and developed a design architecture wherein the dielectric fluid is stored at the back of the fingertip. We physically characterize the static and dynamic behavior of the device. In addition, we conduct psychophysical characterization of the device through a set of user studies. This electrohydraulic interface demonstrates a new way to design and develop high- resolution multimodal haptic systems at the fingertips for AR/VR environments.

Purnendu presented research on wearable electrohydraulic fingertip interfaces at the IEEE World Haptics Conference in Delft, Netherlands.

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Ellen Yi-Luen Do and Carson Bruns win graduate school awards for outstanding mentorship

Anonymous — Wed, 04 May 2022 19:10:41 +0000

Ellen Yi-Luen Do and Carson Bruns win graduate school awards for outstanding mentorship Anonymous (not verified) Wed, 05/04/2022 - 13:10

Praised by their graduate students for their scientific competence, work ethic, creativity and compassion, two ATLAS professors received Outstanding Faculty Mentor awards from CU ��«��Ƶ’s Graduate school on May 3, an honor bestowed this year on only 18 faculty members campus-wide.

Ellen Yi-Luen Do, professor of computer science and director of the ACME Lab, and Carson Bruns, an assistant professor of mechanical engineering and director of the Emergent Nanomaterials Lab, were both honored for outstanding contributions to mentoring individual graduate students and the quality of their interactions with them.

Their nomination materials showcased their many contributions in mentoring graduate students and supporting the mission of graduate education, while supporting their students’ career development and individual growth.

Carson Bruns
Bruns’ research focuses on emergent nanomaterials—engineering matter at the smallest of scales to create materials with particular properties. His group has received wide recognition for its work on “smart tattoos," which have the potential to impart new properties to skin.

Jesse Butterfield, an ATLAS-affiliated PhD candidate and alumnus of the Emergent Nanomaterials Lab, said that Bruns regularly comes up with “brilliant ideas for impactful scientific work.” One such idea—the use of invisible tattoo inks to protect skin from UV light and the cancers it causes—forms the backbone of Butterfield’s PhD studies.

“He spends more time with his grad students than any other advisor that I’m aware of, and with some of them by orders of magnitude,” Butterfield said. “He gives each of us his full attention.”

Bruns always pushes his students to work on their career goals, even when it slows progress within the lab, Butterfield adds, including when two students wanted to take time out to intern with companies of interest, and when Butterfield wanted to teach an undergraduate class.

Butterfield said Bruns’ kindness has been unwavering since they began working together in 2017. “I give the strongest recommendation possible for awarding Carson, in large part due to his capabilities and strengths in his work, but also for his personal qualities, which allow him to continuously raise up the people around him. He is one of those rare people who constantly makes those around him better.”

Ellen Yi-Luen Do
In Ellen Do’s ACME Lab, students are engaged in a wide range of projects, from alternative game control, to immersive musical jam sessions, to robotics for wellness, to visual analytics, toys to promote child development and generative art.

Despite the breadth of their work, she tells her nine PhD and two master’s students that she is always available: “only an email or door away.”

And on any given day, the ACME Lab is a busy central hub, buzzing and flowing with undergraduate and graduate students, says ATLAS PhD Student Sandra Bae. “Ellen has cultivated a lab culture where her students warmly welcome any student interested in research to join our weekly lab meetings, directly mentor undergraduate or master’s students for their capstone projects or simply invite others to socialize. She understands the importance of a social support system where the lab functions as a family.”

Bae points out that Do is excellent at harnessing and directing the interests of her students. “Her mentoring strength comes from how observant she is,” says Bae.

“As a PhD advisee of Ellen’s, her influence is imprinted on my life,” Bae said. “She is my academic mentor, who listened to my first conference presentation five times in a row; my senior, who taught me how to treat friends and myself with compassion; my spiritual leader, who motivates me with her delightful energy; my personal role model, who helps me, another Asian-American woman, be more confident that I belong and can succeed in academia.”

ATLAS Community Members Receiving 2022 Graduate School Awards

Fiona Bell, ATLAS PhD student, member of the Living Matter Lab; Dissertation Completion Fellowship, (one academic semester of financial support).

Carson Bruns, assistant professor, ATLAS Institute & Mechanical Engineering; Outstanding Faculty Mentor Award.

Ellen Yi-Luen Do, professor, ATLAS Institute & Computer Science; Outstanding Faculty Mentor Award.

Sasha de Koninck, PhD candidate in Intermedia Art, Writing and Performance, member of the Unstable Design Lab; Graduate School Summer Fellowship ($6,000); Beverly Sears Graduate Student Grant ($1,000).

Varsha Koushik, PhD'22, Computer Science, member of the Superhuman Computing Lab; First-place, Three-Minute Thesis Competition Winner.

Anthony Pinter, PhD'22, Information Science, ATLAS lecturer and incoming teaching assistant professor; Second-place, Three-Minute Thesis Competition winner.

Purnendu, ATLAS PhD student; Beverly Sears Graduate Student Grant ($1,000).

Praised by their graduate students for their scientific competence, work ethic, creativity and compassion, two ATLAS professors received Outstanding Faculty Mentor awards from CU ��«��Ƶ’s Graduate School on May 3, an honor bestowed this year on only 18 faculty members campus-wide.

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Touching Virtual Reality

Anonymous — Wed, 09 Feb 2022 19:51:05 +0000

Touching Virtual Reality Anonymous (not verified) Wed, 02/09/2022 - 12:51

Imagine yourself sipping coffee at a café wearing augmented reality glasses and summoning a virtual screen and keyboard that immediately appears in front of you. Wearing haptic feedback gloves, as you type, you feel each keystroke on your fingertips, and if you run your fingers along the edge of your keyboard, you feel its edges. You can also move the keyboard around on the table—it feels as if it's real, and the screen hovering at an ergonomically optimal height above the keyboard looks like a normal screen. However, to a passerby, the only thing in front of you is a cup of coffee. Your fingers are moving in thin air and you are looking intently at nothing.

Realizing technology that makes this possible is a goal of Reality Labs Research at Meta (previously Facebook), where ATLAS PhD student Purnendu has been helping develop soft, wearable devices, such as wristbands, rings and gloves, that deliver just the right level of haptic feedback to a wearer in response to contact with an object in virtual or augmented reality. Haptic feedback is created a variety of ways, including through tiny electric motors (actuators) and shape-changing materials.

"This is a great opportunity not only to build upon my earlier work at ATLAS, but also to be around people tasked with inventing the future of human interaction in augmented and virtual reality,” says Purnendu, who will remain at Meta in Redmond, Washington through August.

The work aligns with Purnendu's doctoral research on shaping materials using electrostatic fields and developing human-centered applications. During the internship, Purnendu plans to explore building body-worn solutions—leveraging insights from his past research which emphasized the shape-changing behavior of soft electrohydraulic actuators.

Purnendu holds an integrated master’s degree in physics from Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Roorkee in India and has a background in material science and design. He is advised by Assistant Professor Carson Bruns and Associate Professor Gregory Whiting.

Normally virtual surfaces cannot be felt because they aren't there. But at Reality Labs Research at Meta, (previously known as Facebook), ATLAS PhD Student Purnendu is researching soft, wearable devices–such as wristbands, rings or gloves –that could enable tactile sensations in virtual/augmented reality environments.

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Augmenting Books With Tangible Animation

Anonymous — Mon, 31 Jan 2022 19:01:10 +0000

Augmenting Books With Tangible Animation Anonymous (not verified) Mon, 01/31/2022 - 12:01

SIGGRAPH sat down with Purnendu, a PhD student in the ATLAS Institute and a researcher at Meta Reality Labs, to talk about his team’s SIGGRAPH 2021 Labs project, “Electriflow: Augmenting Books With Tangible Animation Using Soft Electrohydraulic Actuators.” The team's actuator technology strives to augment animation within physical books.

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Origami comes to life with new shape-changing materials

Anonymous — Thu, 22 Jul 2021 21:52:25 +0000

Origami comes to life with new shape-changing materials Anonymous (not verified) Thu, 07/22/2021 - 15:52

Imagine opening up a book of nature photos only to see a kaleidoscope of graceful butterflies flutter out from the page. Such fanciful storybooks might soon be possible thanks to the work of a team of designers and engineers at CU ��«��Ƶ’s ATLAS Institute.

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ATLAS @ CHI 2021

Anonymous — Fri, 14 May 2021 20:19:27 +0000

ATLAS @ CHI 2021 Anonymous (not verified) Fri, 05/14/2021 - 14:19

ATLAS researchers presented 10 published works and one special interest group at the 2021 Human Factors in Computing Conference, the world’s preeminent forum for the field of human-computer interaction. The conference, commonly referred to as CHI, was held virtually May 8-13, 2021.

Researchers affiliated with Danielle Szafir's VisuaLab authored four of the nine ATLAS papers admitted to the conference, two of which received awards, including "Best Paper" and "Honorable Mention." The Unstable Design Lab had two papers accepted, while the THING, Emergent Nanomaterials, Superhuman Computing, and Living Matter labs each had one. An additional paper was co-authored by alumna Andrea DeVore TAM '18, who is not associated with an ATLAS lab.

In all, 2,844 papers were submitted to CHI 2021, 28 of which were selected for the "Best Paper" award and 114 received "Honorable Mention." In 2020, CHI accepted nine ATLAS papers, including four from the Unstable Design Lab and one each from the Superhuman Computing, Living Matter, VisuaLab, ACME and IRON labs.

CHI 2021 papers, position papers and workshops by ATLAS faculty and students

VisuaLab

Understanding Data Accessibility for People with Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities. [Best Paper Award].
Keke Wu (PhD student, ATLAS), Emma Petersen, (CTD MS student, ATLAS), Tahmina Ahmad, (Computer Science BS student), David Burlinson (PhD Computer Science, University of North Carolina), E. S. Tanis (faculty, CU Denver–Anschultz), and Danielle Szafir (faculty, ATLAS/Computer Science)
Researchers conducted a web-based mixed-methods experiment with 34 participants with and without Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities (IDDs) to identify their differences in reading data and summarized the findings into four accessible visualization design guidelines.

Immersive Design Reviews through Situated Qualitative Feedback (workshop paper)
M. Whitlock (PhD student, Computer Science) and Danielle Albers Szafir (faculty, ATLAS/Computer Science)
This paper on Immersive Design Reviews through Situated Qualitative Feedback was accepted to the Evaluating User Experiences in Mixed Reality Workshop at CHI 2021.

VisuaLab Collaborations

Grand Challenges in Immersive Analytics
Danielle Szafir (faculty, ATLAS/Computer Science), Matt Whitlock (PhD student, Computer Science) and 22 other international experts.
A diverse group of 24 international experts developed 17 key research challenges, providing a systematic roadmap of current directions as well as the impending hurdles to facilitating productive and effective applications for Immersive Analytics.

danceON: Culturally Responsive Creative Computing for Data Literacy [Best Paper Honorable Mention]
Willie Payne (BS/MS alumnus Computer Science/Music Composition), Mary West (PhD student, Computer Science), Carlie Charp (CTD BS student, ATLAS), Ben Shapiro (faculty, Computer Science), Edd Taylor (faculty, Education).

Dance provides opportunities for embodied interdisciplinary learning experiences that can be personally and culturally relevant. danceON's system supports learners to leverage their body movement as they engage in artistic practices across data science, computing and dance. It allows users to bind virtual shapes to body positions in under three lines of code, while also enabling complex, dynamic animations that users can design working with conditionals and past position data. The work identifies implications for how design can support learners' expression across culturally relevant themes and examines challenges from the lens of usability of the computing language and technology.

Unstable Design Lab

The Fundamental Uncertainties of Mothering: Finding Ways to Honor Endurance, Struggle, and Contradiction
Laura Devendorf (faculty, ATLAS/Information Science), Laura Kristina Andersen, (faculty, Eindhoven University of Technology/Department of Industrial Design), Aisling Kelliher, (faculty, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University/Computer Science).
Parent-focused smart devices and data-tracking platforms frame the responsible parent as one who evaluates, analyzes and mitigates data-defined risks for their children and family. In this article, the researchers turn away from self-improvement narratives to attend to their own experiences as mothers and designers through creating Design Memoirs, speaking directly to the HCI community from their positions as both users and subjects of optimized parenting tools.

Late-breaking work
From The Art of Reflection to The Art of Noticing: A Shifting View of Self-Tracking Technologies’ Role in Supporting Sustainable Food Practices
Janghee Cho, (PhD student, Information Science), Laura Devendorf (faculty, ATLAS/Information Science) and Stephen Voida (faculty, Information Science).
This paper explores using self-tracking technologies that might help people draw attention to the impact of their food practices on the environment and promote sustainable food habits.
Video

Living Matter Lab

Self-deStaining Textiles: Designing Interactive Systems with Fabric, Stains and Light
Fiona Bell, (PhD student, ATLAS), Mirela Alistar (faculty, ATLAS/Computer Science), and Laura Devendorf (faculty, ATLAS/Information Science)
More information
While staining happens unintentionally (e.g., spilling coffee), this paper introduces “destaining” as an intentional design tool that can be used by HCI practitioners and designers alike to selectively degrade stains on textiles in aesthetic ways.

Superhuman Computing Lab

Exploring Technology Design for Students with Vision Impairment in the Classroom and Remotely
Vinitha Gadiraju (PhD student, Computer Science), Olwyn Doyle (BA Computer Science and Political Science '20) and Shaun K. Kane (faculty, ATLAS/Computer Science)
This work explores how classroom technology design can imitate the instructional strategies educators use to teach visually impaired students the academic and behavioral skills outlined by the Expanded Core Curriculum.

THING Lab & Laboratory for Emergent Nanomaterials

Soft Electrohydraulic Actuators for Origami Inspired Shape-Changing Interfaces
Purnendu (PhD student, ATLAS),Eric Acome (Keplinger Research Group), Christoph Keplinger, (faculty, Mechanical Engineering), Mark D. Gross (faculty, ATLAS/Computer Science), Carson Bruns (faculty, ATLAS/Mechanical Engineering) and Daniel Leithinger (faculty, ATLAS/Computer Science).
This work introduces electrohydraulic actuators capable of producing sharp hinge-like bends that can be used to actuate existing objects or fold origami creases.

OTHER

Parental Mediation for Young Children’s Use of Educational Media: A Case Study with Computational Toys and Kits
Junnan Yu (INFO PhD Candidate), Andrea DeVore (ATLAS Undergrad Alumna), Ricarose Roque (INFO Faculty)

Special Interest Group

Microbe-HCI: Introduction and Directions for Growth
Raphael Kim (Queen Mary University), Pat Pataranutaporn (MIT), Jack Forman (MIT), Seung Ah Lee (Yonsei University), Ingmar Riedel-Kruse (University of Arizona), Mirela Alistar (faculty, ATLAS/Computer Science), Eldy S. Lazaro Vasquez (UC Davis), Katia Vega (UC Davis) Roland van Dierendonck (Studio Roland van Dierendonck), Gilad Gome (The Interdisciplinary Center (IDC) Herzliya), Oren Zuckerman (The Interdisciplinary Center (IDC) Herzliya), Angela Vujic (MIT), David Sun Kong (MIT), Pattie Maes (MIT Media Lab), Hiroshi Ishii, (MIT), Misha Sra (UCSB), Stefan Poslad (Queen Mary University).

Microbes bring a distinct set of functional, practical and ethical ramifications in interaction design. This special interest group addresses the various forms that microbial integration in human-computer interaction can take. The sessions are engaging, focused and orientated conversations around microbes acting as agents of interaction.

ATLAS researchers have 10 published works and one special interest group associated with the CHI 2021 conference, the world’s preeminent conference for the field of human-computer interaction. Held virtually, CHI 2021, also known as ACM’s Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, took place May 8-13.

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