As more people work from home or during travel, new opportunities and challenges arise around mobile office work. They may need to work in makeshift spaces with less than optimal working conditions; applications are not flexible to their physical and social context, and remote collaboration does not account for the difference between the user's conditions and capabilities.
Using scene understanding, the ability to augment users' senses to disconnect them from physical limitations, and new architecture for developing applications that share the space with users can change how information workers work. I will display my research in various opportunities for realizing a mobile immersive working environment.
Eyal Ofek, Ph.D.
I received my Ph.D. in computer vision from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 2000. I have founded two startup companies, in areas of computer graphics and computer vision, and in 1996 I joined the founding group of 3DV Systems, developing the world's first time-of-flight (TOF) depth camera. The technology that I worked on became the basis for the depth sensors, later included in Augmented Reality headsets such as Microsoft HoloLens and Magic Leap HMDs.
In 2004, I joined Microsoft Research and for 6 years I was the head of Bing Maps & Mobile research. My group developed technologies and services such as the world's first street-side service, and the popular Stroke Width Transform text detection, later included in OpenCV.
In 2011 I formed a new research group at Microsoft Research, centered on augmented reality. We have developed experimental systems for an environment-aware layout of augmented reality experiences, used by several HoloLens teams and was a base for the Unity Mars product.
Since 2014, I have focused on Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) and Mixed Reality (MR) and Haptics.