Event Location: GHC 6115
Bio: Dov Katz is leading Oculus VR’s computer vision R&D. He is passionate about human and computer perception. His research interest include computer vision, machine learning, and autonomous manipulation. At Oculus, he developed a high precision – low latency optical position tracking system. He is currently engaged in several projects that will deliver a more immersive and intuitive VR experience.

He was previously a postdoctoral fellow at Carnegie Mellon University. He received his MS in 2008 and Ph.D. in 2011 from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, and his BS in 2004 from Tel-Aviv University, Israel. He was the recipient of several national and international awards, and his work received attention in the popular press. He is the founder of the IEEE/RAS technical committee on mobile manipulation.

Abstract: There’s been a lot of talk lately about how VR is the next big platform, but that’s not really accurate; it’s something bigger and more fundamental, nothing less than a phase change in the way that we interact with information. This talk will discuss why that’s so, what going to be involved in getting to that point, and why VR is going to open up huge new research and development opportunities.

VR is coupled with our embodiment more than any existing interface. A compelling and immersive VR experience requires that our interactions with the physical world are mapped precisely and with low latency onto the virtual environment. This creates a variety of challenges, including hardware design, processing multi modal sensor data, and filtering. The second part of the talk will focus on our current solution to the problem of head tracking.