Shahram Ghandeharizadeh
University of Southern California, CA·Computer Science
Imagine seeing glowing three-dimensional objects in the air with your naked eye, then reaching out and pushing them with your bare hands, and feeling them push back. This exploratory project asks whether swarms of tiny drones could create such displays.
- Fields
Computer Science
Engineering
- Topics
human-computer interaction
haptics
drone swarms
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Aug 2027
What they work on
- Configure Flying Light Speck microdrones with lights bright enough to render the drones themselves invisible while flying and while tolerating touch such as poking.
- Develop methods for drone swarms to localize with millimeter accuracy for realistic illumination and accurate measurement of the force a person exerts.
- Design swarm control so drones push back on a user consistent with Newtonian physics, rendering translation, rotation, collision and friction, and evaluate it in human participant studies.
More about the research
The result would be a new way for people to interact with computers, with possible uses in education, manufacturing, healthcare and entertainment.
Why it matters
If drone swarms can render touchable, physically realistic 3D objects without headsets, the technology could change how people learn, design products, train for healthcare tasks and play. Studies with human participants will show which tradeoffs matter most for making such displays feel realistic.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Jane Huang
University of Notre Dame, IN·Computer Science
Design human-centered interfaces that help teams supervise autonomous drone swarms in time-critical tasks such as disaster response, using cognitive work analysis and iterative user-centered design.
Haijun Xia
University of California-San Diego, CA·Computer Science
Analyze diagrams that programmers produce themselves to identify what qualities make graphics effective and directly manipulable for understanding and changing code.
Hamid Nadir
University of North Carolina at Greensboro, NC·Education Research
Identify challenges and opportunities in current elementary curricula and co-design a combined Biology and Computer Science (Bio+CS) curriculum with local teachers and students.
The school
University of Southern California: 47 labs on PI Pages, $1.3B a year on research, 882 research doctorates a year.
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