Where's My Drink? Enabling Peripheral Real World Interactions While Using HMDs

Mentor: Prof. David Forsyth, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
Duration: June -September 2014  
Head Mounted Displays (HMDs) allow users to experience virtual reality with a great level of immersion. However, even simple physical tasks like drinking a beverage can be difficult and awkward while in a virtual reality experience. We explore mixed reality renderings that selectively incorporate the physical world into the virtual world for interactions with physical objects. We conducted a user study comparing four rendering techniques that balances immersion in a virtual world with ease of interaction with the physical world.

Paper: arXiv
Press Coverage: Discover, MIT Technology Review

Enabling Expressive User Interaction in a Multimodal Interface for Object Selection in Virtual 3D Environments

Mentor: Dr. Sriganesh Madhvanath, Senior Research Scientist, HP Labs India
Duration: July 2011-June 2012  
We developed a system which facilitates interaction with a 3D scene using speech and visual gestures. The system provides functionality of using speech as a filter to the pointing gesture so as to alleviate the shortcomings of unimodal interface for 3D environments. The system also provides functionality of using only speech to refer to desired objects. References can be made using distinguishable properties of the object, spatial location in the scene and spatial relation with another object. 

The project got selected at 14th ACM International Conference on Multimodal Interaction (ICMI '12) as a demo presentation and the paper got published in conference proceedings.[paper]

Dissection of the interface of Hyperthermophile proteins - An Intricate Study

Mentor: Dr. Sumit Biswas, Assistant Professor, Dept. of Biological Sciences, BITS Pilani - K K Birla Goa Campus
Duration: January 2010 - March 2011 
The project aimed at finding structural relationship among all the DNA binding Hyperthermophile proteins. Multiple features like Accessibility Surface Area and propensity of Amino Acids were computed and investigated by performing computational analysis on statistical data of 89 proteins. The task of data manipulation was largely handled by programs and scripts written in C and bash respectively.