Pedro Lopes (Hasso Plattner Institute, Germany) will give a lecture at Tokyo University Daiwa Ubiquitous Hall.

Date & Time: Oct 3rd, 2017 13:00- (Doors open around 12:50)
Venue: Ishibashi Hall, Daiwa-Ubiquitous Research Building (3F), The University of Tokyo (direction)

Note: This lecture is a part of Tokyo University
Advanced Lectures in Applied Computer Science XII 東京大学大学院講義：総合分析情報学特論XII (aka Human-Computer Interaction Lectures), but it is open to the public.

Interactive Systems based on Electrical Muscle Stimulation

Abstract: In the past years interfaces got closer and closer to the human body to the point that now, they literally attach to it, such as wearable devices and virtual reality headsets. These provide a very direct and immersive interaction with virtual worlds. But what if, instead, these interfaces were “part of our body”? In this talk I introduce the idea of an interactive system based on electrical muscle stimulation (EMS). EMS is a technique from medical rehabilitation in which a signal generator and electrodes attached to the user’s skin are used to send electrical impulses that involuntarily contract the user’s muscles. While EMS devices have been used to regenerate lost motor functions in rehabilitation medicine since the ’60s, it has only been a few years since researchers started to explore EMS as a means for creating interactive systems. These more recent projects, including six of my projects, explore EMS as a means for teaching users new motor skills, increasing immersion in virtual experiences by simulating impact and walls in VR/AR, communicating with remote users and allowing users to read & write information using eyes-free wearable devices.

Bio: Pedro is a researcher at Prof. Baudisch’s Human-Computer Interaction Lab at the Hasso Plattner Institute, Germany. Pedro’s work is published at ACM CHI/UIST and demonstrated at venues such as ACM SIGGRAPH and IEEE Haptics. Pedro has received the ACM CHI Best Paper award for his work on Affordance++, several nominations and exhibited at Ars Electronica 2017. His work also captured the interest of media, such as MIT Technology Review, NBC, Discovery Channel, NewScientist or Wired.

(Learn more about Pedro’s work here: plopes.org/).