Cray Colloquium: How to Build a Holodeck

The computer science colloquium takes place on Mondays from 11:15 a.m. - 12:15 p.m.

This week's talk is a part of the Cray Distinguished Speaker Series. This series was established in 1981 by an endowment from Cray Research and brings distinguished visitors to the Department of Computer Science & Engineering every year.

Our speaker, Ken Perlin (New York University), will be giving a talk titled "How to Build a Holodeck".

Abstract

In the age of COVID-19 it is more clear than ever that there is a compelling need for better remote collaboration.  Fortunately a number of technologies are starting to converge which will allow us to take such collaborations to a whole new level.  Imagine that when you join an on-line meeting you are present with your entire body, and that you can see and hear other people as though you are all in the same room.

There are many challenges to realizing this vision properly.  The NYU Future Reality Lab and its collaborators are working on many of them.  This talk will give an overview of many of the key areas of research, including how to guarantee universal accessibility, user privacy and rights management, low latency networking, design and construction of shared virtual worlds, correct rendering of spatial audio, biometric sensing, and a radical rethinking of user interface design.

Biography

Ken Perlin is a professor in the Department of Computer Science at NYU, where he directs the Future Reality Lab, and is lead PI for the NSF-funded NYU Holodeck project. Research interests include future reality, computer graphics and animation, user interfaces and education. He is chief scientist at Parallux Inc., Tactonic Technologies and Autotoon Inc. Awards include an Academy Award for Technical Achievement and the 2008 ACM/SIGGRAPH Computer Graphics Achievement Award. He was general chair of the UIST 2010 conference, and a featured artist at the Whitney Museum of American Art. Education: Ph.D. in Computer Science from NYU; B.A. in theoretical mathematics from Harvard.