Capstone Abstract

With every advance in sensing comes a renewed belief that user experience design will melt away, replaced by instinct and "natural" tendencies. As illustrated in the commercial development of multitouch technologies, this is demonstrably false. In this talk, we will review lessons learned from mistakes made in early capacitive touchscreen commercialization efforts through to the present day, and propose a path forward for rich, highly functional, appropriate user interfaces for augmented and virtual reality.

Daniel is an Associate Professor and the NSERC-Facebook Industrial Research Chair of Human-Machine Interaction at the University of Toronto. He has previously conducted research as part of teams at Microsoft Research (MSR), Mitsubishi Electric Research Labs (MERL), Cornell Tech, the University of Washington, and Harvard University. In the late 2000’s, he served as Microsoft’s architect of natural user interface technologies, working with teams to develop the basic tenets and technologies of Microsoft Kinect, Microsoft Surface, Windows, Office Mobile, and several other products.

Daniel has a history of founding companies that commercialize his team’s work in human-computer interaction. He founded and now serves as Chief Scientist of Chatham Labs, and also co-founded Tactual Labs and Addem, all of which work to commercialize his and his team’s work. His research in touch software has shipped out to more than 2 billion devices, in addition to being described in nearly 100 peer-reviewed papers and protected by over 40 US patents and international equivalents. He has also authored the top-selling book on the design of user interfaces for new hardware technologies.