Professor Eyal Ofek

School of Computer Science
Chair of Computer Science

Contact details

Telephone: +44 (0)7570 633381
Email: e.ofek@bham.ac.uk

Address: School of Computer Science
University of Birmingham
Edgbaston
Birmingham
B15 2TT
UK

Professor Ofek is a chair of computer Science.

Prior to joining the university he was a principal researcher at Microsoft Research, leading academic and industrial research in computer vision, graphics and HCI for 19 years, and an entrepreneur starting technology companies.

Qualifications

Senior member of the Assoc. of Computing Machines (ACM).

Biography

Professor Ofek is a chair of computer Science at the University of Birmingham.

His research focused on using sensing and scene understanding for Human-Computer Interaction and using sensing and Mixed Reality (MR), enabling better collaboration and more inclusive workspace. He has been granted over 120 patents and published over 100 academic publications at leading venues, cited by more than 17000 publications.

Prior to joining the University, Eyal was a principal researcher at Microsoft Research (2004-2023) and developing AI for autonomous firefighting drone.

Professor Ofek formed and led a new MR research group at Microsoft Research. He envisions MR applications as weaved with the fabric of our lives rather than PC and mobile apps, limited to running on a specific device’s screen. Such applications must be aware of users’ changing physical and social contexts and be flexible to adapt accordingly. We developed systems such as FLARE (Fast Layout for AR experiences) used by the HoloLens Team and Unity MARS product, or Triton 3D audio simulation used by Microsoft Games and is the base of Microsoft Acoustics.

Eyal formed the Bing Maps & Mobile Research Lab. We combined generated many novel results, impacting the product while generating world-class computer vision and graphics research. Among our results is the development of the influential text detector technology used by the Bing Mobile app and incorporated into OpenCV, the world’s first street-side imagery service, street-level reconstruction of geometry and texture pipeline, novel texture compression used by Bing Maps, and more.

He oversaw software and algorithms R&D of the world’s first time-of-flight video camera in a startup company and used our depth cameras for applications such as TV depth keying, and camera-based gaming. The depth camera was later evolved to be included in the Microsoft HoloLens and MagicLeap HMDs. Another company he formed developed the popular Amiga PhotonPaint editor.

Eyal is a senior member of the ACM. He was the paper chair of ACM SIGSPATIAL 2011, the haptics editor of Frontiers in VR and member of the editorial board of IEEE CG&A. He serves on conference committees such as CVPR, CHI, UIST, ISMAR, and ISS.

Eyal has released multiple tools and open-source libraries such as the RoomAlive Toolkit [RoomAliveToolkit23], used around the world for multi-projection systems, SeeingVR to enhance the use of VR for people with low vision, Microsoft Rocketbox avatars, MoveBox [MoveBox23] and HeadBox toolkits to democratize avatar animation, and RemoteLab for distributed user studies.

More information on Professor Ofek's research page.

Postgraduate supervision

Doctoral Supervision: in areas of HCI, Sensing, Vision and Mixed reality

Research

The modern workspace increases the demands on remote workers. Working on the go and in makeshift offices, Workers must establish their work interfaces in a variety of less-than-perfect environments. Collaboration from afar, separated by screens and lacking the support of body gestures cues, and the common shared physical environment they enjoyed during in-person collaboration is a great challenge.

Professor Ofek's research examined the context of users and generate smart applications that adapts to a variation of the users’ environments, physical and social context, people's physical capabilities, and more. His past research has generated adaptive AR layout technology incorporated into industry tools such as the Unity game engine and Microsoft HoloLens.

Eyal's work is aimed to level the plain field between collaborators that difference not just by distance but also by physical capabilities, availability of devices, and time differences, making a more inclusive workspace.

His research involves multiple disciplines including computer Vision, graphics, mixed reality, HCI and haptics.

Publications

Highlight publications

Lin, Y, Zhang, P, Ofek, E & Je, S 2024, ArmDeformation: Inducing the Sensation of Arm Deformation in Virtual Reality Using Skin-Stretching. in FF Mueller, P Kyburz, JR Williamson, C Sas, ML Wilson, PT Dugas & I Shklovski (eds), CHI '24: Proceedings of the CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems., 407, Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), CHI '24: CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, Honolulu, Hawaii, United States, 11/05/24. https://doi.org/10.1145/3613904.3642518

Kim, MJ, Ofek, E, Pahud, M, Sinclair, MJ & Bianchi, A 2024, Big or Small, It’s All in Your Head: Visuo-Haptic Illusion of Size-Change Using Finger-Repositioning. in FF Mueller, P Kyburz, JR Williamson, C Sas, ML Wilson, PT Dugas & I Shklovski (eds), CHI '24: Proceedings of the CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems., 751, Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), CHI '24: CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, Honolulu, Hawaii, United States, 11/05/24. https://doi.org/10.1145/3613904.364225

Pacchierotti, C, Chinello, F, Koumaditis, K, Luca, MD, Ofek, E & Georgiou, O 2024, 'Guest Editorial Haptics in the Metaverse: Haptic Feedback for Virtual, Augmented, Mixed, and eXtended Realities', IEEE Transactions on Haptics, vol. 17, no. 2, 10566110, pp. 122-128. https://doi.org/10.1109/TOH.2024.3369192

Recent publications

Article

Maselli, A, Ofek, E, Cohn, B, Hinckley, K & Gonzalez-Franco, M 2023, 'Enhanced efficiency in visually guided online motor control for actions redirected towards the body midline', Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, vol. 378, no. 1869, 20210453. https://doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2021.0453

Biener, V, Gesslein, T, Schneider, D, Kawala, F, Otte, A, Kristensson, PO, Pahud, M, Ofek, E, Campos, C & Kljun, M 2022, 'Povrpoint: Authoring presentations in mobile virtual reality', IEEE transactions on visualization and computer graphics, vol. 28, no. 5, pp. 2069-2079. https://doi.org/10.1109/TVCG.2022.3150474

Biener, V, Kalamkar, S, Nouri, N, Ofek, E, Pahud, M, Dudley, JJ, Hu, J, Kristensson, PO, Weerasinghe, M & Pucihar, KČ 2022, 'Quantifying the effects of working in VR for one week', IEEE transactions on visualization and computer graphics, vol. 28, no. 11, pp. 3810-3820. https://doi.org/10.1109/TVCG.2022.3203103

Yamagami, M, Junuzovic, S, Gonzalez-Franco, M, Ofek, E, Cutrell, E, Porter, JR, Wilson, AD & Mott, ME 2022, 'Two-in-one: A design space for mapping unimanual input into bimanual interactions in VR for users with limited movement', ACM Transactions on Accessible Computing, vol. 15, no. 3, 23. https://doi.org/10.1145/3510463

Steed, A, Ofek, E, Sinclair, M & Gonzalez-Franco, M 2021, 'A mechatronic shape display based on auxetic materials', Nature Communications, vol. 12, no. 1, 4758. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-021-24974-0

Chapter

Biener, V, Ofek, E, Pahud, M, Kristensson, PO & Grubert, J 2023, Extended reality for knowledge work in everyday environments. in A Simeone, B Weyers, S Bialkova & RW Lindeman (eds), Everyday Virtual and Augmented Reality. 1 edn, Human–Computer Interaction Series, Springer, Cham, pp. 21-56. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-05804-2_2

Conference contribution

Li, R, Seyed, T, Marquardt, N, Ofek, E, Hodges, S, Sinclair, M, Romat, H, Pahud, M, Sharma, J & Buxton, WAS 2023, AdHocProx: Sensing Mobile, Ad-Hoc Collaborative Device Formations using Dual Ultra-Wideband Radios. in CHI '23: Proceedings of the 2023 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems., 623, Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), CHI '23, Hamburg , Germany, 23/04/23. https://doi.org/10.1145/3544548.3581300

Panda, P, Nicholas, MJ, Nguyen, D, Ofek, E, Pahud, M, Rintel, S, Gonzalez-Franco, M, Hinckley, K & Lanier, J 2023, Beyond audio: Towards a design space of headphones as a site for interaction and sensing. in DIS '23: Proceedings of the 2023 ACM Designing Interactive Systems Conference. Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), pp. 904-916, DIS '23, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States, 10/07/23. https://doi.org/10.1145/3563657.3596022

Wang, CY, Nir, O, Vemprala, S, Kapoor, A, Ofek, E, McDuff, D & Gonzalez-Franco, M 2023, CityLifeSim: A High-Fidelity Pedestrian and Vehicle Simulation with Complex Behaviors. in 2022 IEEE 2nd International Conference on Intelligent Reality (ICIR). IEEE, pp. 11-16, 2022 IEEE 2nd International Conference on Intelligent Reality (ICIR), Piscataway, New Jersey, United States, 14/12/22. https://doi.org/10.1109/ICIR55739.2022.00018

Tao, Y, Wang, CY, Wilson, AD, Ofek, E & Gonzalez-Franco, M 2023, Embodying physics-aware avatars in virtual reality. in CHI '23: CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems., 254, Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), CHI '23, Hamburg , Germany, 23/04/23. https://doi.org/10.1145/3544548.3580979

Panda, P, Nicholas, MJ, Gonzalez-Franco, M, Inkpen, K, Ofek, E, Cutler, R, Hinckley, K & Lanier, J 2022, Alltogether: Effect of avatars in mixed-modality conferencing environments. in CHIWORK '22: Proceedings of the 1st Annual Meeting of the Symposium on Human-Computer Interaction for Work., 8, Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), CHIWORK 2022, Durham, New Hampshire, United States, 8/06/22. https://doi.org/10.1145/3533406.3539658

Volonte, M, Ofek, E, Jakubzak, K, Bruner, S & Gonzalez-Franco, M 2022, Headbox: A facial blendshape animation toolkit for the microsoft rocketbox library. in 2022 IEEE Conference on Virtual Reality and 3D User Interfaces Abstracts and Workshops (VRW). IEEE, pp. 39-42, 2022 IEEE Conference on Virtual Reality and 3D User Interfaces, Online, 12/03/22. https://doi.org/10.1109/VRW55335.2022.00015

Lee, J, Natarrajan, R, Rodriguez, SS, Panda, P & Ofek, E 2022, RemoteLab: a VR remote study toolkit. in M Agrawala, JO Wobbrock, E Adar & V Setlur (eds), UIST '22: Proceedings of the 35th Annual ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology., 51, Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), UIST '22: The 35th Annual ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology, Bend, Oregon, United States, 29/10/22. https://doi.org/10.1145/3526113.3545679

Jain, D, Junuzovic, S, Ofek, E, Sinclair, M, Porter, J, Yoon, C, Machanavajhala, S & Ringel Morris, M 2021, A taxonomy of sounds in virtual reality. in DIS '21: Proceedings of the 2021 ACM Designing Interactive Systems Conference. Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), pp. 160-170, DIS '21, Online, 28/06/21. https://doi.org/10.1145/3461778.3462106

Preprint

Gonzalez-Franco, M, Ofek, E, Holz, C, Steed, A, Lanier, J, Buxton, B, Hinckley, K & Sinclair, M 2022 'Taxonomy of hand-object haptics for virtual reality' TechRxiv. https://doi.org/10.36227/techrxiv.20182229.v1

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