Institute of Information Science, Academia Sinica

My research is about advancing immersion. Today users see and hear virtual worlds; I want users to also feel virtual worlds. Researchers have sought to better convey not only visual and auditory but also haptic feedback to enhance immersion in virtual worlds. One approach is to use mechanical equipment to provide haptic feedback, e.g. robotic arms, exoskeletons and motion platforms.
However, the size and the weight of such mechanical equipment tends to be proportional to its target’s size and weight, i.e. providing human-scale haptic feedback requires human-scale equipment, often constraining them to arcades and lab environments.
The key idea behind my research is to bypass mechanical equipment by instead leverage human power. Humans are more generic, flexible, and versatile. I thus create software systems that orchestrate humans in doing such mechanical labor—this is what I call human actuation.

Dr. Cheng just started as Assistant Professor in the Computer Science and Information Engineering department at National Taiwan University in February 2019. Advised by Prof. Dr. Patrick Baudisch, he got his PhD degree in Human-Computer Interaction from Hasso Plattner Institute (HPI) in Potsdam, Germany. He had published 8 full papers at top HCI conferences ACM CHI and UIST during his PhD, where 5 of them are first-authored and presented with demos, and one won the Best Demo Award at UIST 2017. He had internships at Apple Inc. in 2014, and at Microsoft Research Redmond in 2016 and 2018. His recent research focuses on brining immersive experiences to a broader audience by mixing the border of virtual and physical reality.