DR. MICHAEL NEBELING

I'm an Associate Professor at the University of Michigan, where I direct the Information Interaction Lab. I am interested in designing and studying novel methods and tools to create virtual, augmented, and mixed reality (XR) experiences that are easy and safe to use. My current focus is on creating new toolkits, authoring tools, and interaction techniques that improve XR interactions from a usability, accessibility, and security/privacy perspective.

In terms of application domains, I am particularly interested in the role XR technologies can play to improve education and accessibility. I want AR/VR to become useful and effective interaction modes that bring real benefits to users taking into account their context, task, and preference. My earlier research established principles, methods, and tools for the design, development, and evaluation of multi-device and cross-device user interfaces. In a second thread of research, I demonstrated how to use crowdsourcing to create responsive web designs, to write a paper from a smartwatch, or to design gesture recognizers. I regularly serve on the program committees of the ACM CHI and UIST conferences. Recently, I was UIST 2021 Papers co-chair.

I received a Disney Research Faculty Award (for excellence in science), a Mozilla Research Award (for reinventing the browser as an AR/VR application delivery platform), an Epic MegaGrant (for educational tools in XR), and a Meta Reality Labs gift (for my work on fairness and inclusion in XR). Working with U-M's Center for Academic Innovation, I started my role as XR Faculty Innovator-in-Residence with the U-M wide XR Initiative in 2019. I created the XR MOOC series, a three-course AR/VR specialization on Coursera. I joined U-M in 2016 after completing a postdoc in the Human-Computer Interaction Institute at Carnegie Mellon University and a PhD in the Department of Computer Science at ETH Zurich. Upon my promotion to Associate Professor in 2022, I spent my sabbatical at Meta Reality Labs Research in Redmond.

Curriculum Vitae

Extended Reality for Everybody (2020)

Below is one of my video lectures from the Extended Reality for Everybody specialization on Coursera. In this short video, I explain the key concepts and terminology in the XR space. It is an example of a video lecture we created in two versions, first using traditional video and then using these more immersive formats. It is also an example of a simple form of virtual production which provided a basis for our XRStudio research project (see below).

Join our XR MOOC specialization on Coursera (free for U-M students and alums through Michigan Online)!

PhD in Technical HCI Office Hour (2022)

I'm always interested in talking to students about doing a PhD in technical HCI. Below is a video of my online office hour with several faculty friends, going through a list of crowdsourced questions that I received from prospective PhD students. I met a lot of great students this way, so I really enjoyed this. This is the third time I was doing it. You can find the ones from 2019, 2020, and 2021 in my YouTube playlist.

Research at the University of Michigan (2016-today)

Since starting the Michigan Information Interaction Lab in September 2016, I have taken my research on cross-device interfaces further and developed a new focus on AR/VR interfaces. Most notably, this work led to three papers at CHI 2018, two papers at CHI 2019, three papers at CHI 2020, and a paper at CHI 2021. I am a key contributor to the XR Initiative (what started as the AVMR Initiative), created an MR Teach-Out, developed two new courses focused on AR/VR design and development, SI 559 and SI 659, and launched the three-course Extended Reality for Everybody XR MOOC series on Coursera in December 2020.

Below is a video of a talk I gave in the Stanford HCI seminar in November 2021:

Selected AR/VR Research

  • MRAT (CHI'20 paper): a system to collect user interaction data of AR/VR users and visualize it in-situ using mixed reality visualizations
  • XRDirector (CHI'20 paper): an collaborative immersive authoring system that adapts roles from filmmaking for virtual production of 3D and AR/VR scenes with interactive content
  • 360proto (CHI'19 paper): a 360 paper prototyping tool to rapidly create AR/VR prototypes from paper and bring them to life on AR/VR devices based on a set of emerging paper prototyping templates specifically for AR/VR immersive environments, AR marker overlays and face masks, VR controller models and menus, and 2D screens and HUDs
  • ProtoAR (CHI'18 paper): a rapid physical-digital prototyping tool for mobile augmented reality apps that enables rapid transition from physical prototyping using paper wireframes and Play-doh models to digital prototyping based on multi-layer cross-device authoring and interactive capture tools
  • XD-AR (EICS'18 paper): an augmented reality platform that we are developing for multi-user multi-device augmented reality experiences that allow users to edit the physical world in realtime
  • 360Anywhere (EICS'18 paper): a platform enabling multi-user collaboration scenarios using augmented reality projections of 360 video streams

Please find out more on the Information Interaction Lab web site.

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Selected Publications

For the full list of publications, please check Google Scholar and DBLP.

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    Visit my research lab!

    Contact

    You can reach me by email via nebeling@umich.edu.

    You can also find me on Twitter @michinebeling.

    News and Events

    Fall 2023
    • Back to Michigan. Welcoming postdoc Janet Johnson in the lab. Continuing work with PhD student Shwetha Rajaram. Teaching SI 559 Intro to AR/VR. All the good stuff.
    • Going to do the next PhD in technical HCI office hour in October/November.

    2022/2023
    • On sabbatical at Meta Reality Labs Research in Redmond.

    Fall 2022
    • Going to do another PhD in technical HCI office hour in October/November.
    • Attending UIST 2022 in Bent, Oregon.
    • Bought a few tickets to CHI 2023 in Germany :)

    August 2022
    • Shwetha Rajaram finished an important PhD milestone and is now a PhD candidate. Congrats!
    • Starting my sabbatical at Meta Reality Labs Research in Redmond.

    Summer 2022 Hosting Veronika Krauss from Germany and Vittoria Frau from Italy in my lab. Going kayaking!

    May 2022 Received tenure effective September 2022. Yay! :)

    Winter 2022
    • Held three office hours for my XR MOOC Specialization on Coursera.
    • Gave a Autodesk Research HCI and Visualization Speaker Series talk and CMU HCII Seminar talk on empowering novice XR designers.

    Fall 2021
    • Co-chaired UIST 2021 with Ranjitha Kumar and Jeff Nichols.
    • Co-hosted our XR social meet-up at UIST 2021 with Pedro Lopes and David Lindlbauer!
    • Gave a Stanford HCI Seminar talk on empowering novice XR designers.
    • Gave a guest lecture on Extended Reality to 100+ police officers in INTERPOL Innovation Center's Virtual Discussion Room series.
    • Co-taught our XR prototyping course with Mark Billinghurst at ISMAR 2021 and SIGGRAPH Asia 2021.
    • My PhD student, Shwetha Rajaram, defended her pre-candidacy milestone!
    • Submited 5 papers, 2 workshops, and 1 course proposal to CHI 2022. Thanks to my co-authors!

    Summer 2021
    • Participated in our Research Experience for Master's Students (REMS) program for the fourth time.
    • Participated in a think tank event organized by Michigan Medicine and Microsoft.
    • Co-hosted our UIST 2021 program committee meeting with almost 80 Associate Chairs!
    • Gave two lectures on HCI and CSCW in our annual Human Factors Engineering summer course.

    • Gave a seminar talk on XR for Everybody in the Empathic Computing Lab led by Mark Billinghurst.

    CHI 2021
    • Co-taught a course on XR prototyping with Mark Billinghurst. We'll repeat it at ISMAR 2021 and SIGGRAPH Asia.
    • Co-presented XRStudio paper with my students.
    • Spontaneously organized an CHI @ XR meet-up with more than 100 people. Let's do it again!

    Spring 2021
    • Submitted my initial tenure materials. Woohoo!
    • 360theater with Max and Katy accepted to EICS 2021.
    • Received an Epic MegaGrant to support my work on using XR for virtual production of immersive lecture materials. So cool!

    2019

    December
    XR MOOC series launched on Coursera!
    CHI 2021 course on rapid prototyping of XR experiences with Mark Billinghurst accepted. It'll feature the techniques I teach in my XR MOOC series!
    CHI 2021 paper (conditionally accepted) on XRStudio, a live virtual production system for streaming immersive instructional experiences where the instructor is in VR and students see the lecture in MR).
    • Enjoyed giving a guest talk at Snap Research hosted by Andrés Monroy-Hernández.

    November Enjoyed participating in Albrecht Schmidt's and Katrin Wolf's Conversations in Mixed Reality!

    UIST 2020 Nice to catch up with many friends at the first virtual UIST. Going to be UIST 2021 Papers Co-chair with Ranjitha Kumar. Fun!

    CSCW 2020 Co-organized our workshop on the future of social AR with guest talks from Julian Bleecker and Jaron Lanier. Yeah!

    CHI 2020 Co-organized our workshop on ethics of mixed reality. Also published pages on our MRAT and XRDirector projects.

    April Attended XR Midwest and joined a talk with Jeremy Nelson on teaching and learning with XR at scale. Thanks to the organizers from ARI!

    March MRAT and a study on key barriers to entry for novice AR/VR creators I co-authored with friends from Canada both won a Best Paper Award at CHI. Now you're cooking!

    February Interviewed many great prospective PhD students. Made two offers. Can't wait to start working with them!

    January Started producing my XR MOOC slated for launch in 2020. I'm very excited to share my experience from my four years of research and teaching in AR/VR at U-M.

    2019

    December
    • Three papers conditionally accepted to CHI 2020: XRDirector (a role-based collaborative immersive authoring tool), MRAT (mixed reality analytics toolkit), and an interview study with 21 participants on key barriers for AR/VR creators. Aloha!
    • Selected as a finalist for MTRAC funding, Michigan's translational research grant, to take some of my AR/VR innovations and create an AR/VR design platform.

    November
    Twitch Office Hours: Doing a PhD in technical HCI (ask your questions here)
    MIT HCI Seminar talk: Prototyping Mixed Reality experiences.
    MUM conference keynote: Making Mixed Reality a thing that designers do and users want.

    October
    • Won't make it to UIST :-(
    • Participating as one of only eight selected teams for U-M's Celebrate Invention event, showcasing 360proto (will be released soon!) and other technologies created in my lab.
    • Won Best Paper Award at CHI Play for our iGYM project with Roland Graf.

    September Aloha, CHI 2020! Apart from a few paper submissions, I also community-sourced two Spotify playlists: one for authors, and one for reviewers. Check them out, they are really great!

    August Went kayaking with the lab! :-)

    July
    • Attending SIGGRAPH 2019, my first! Happy to receive the Disney Research|Studios Award. Thanks to Markus Gross and Bob Sumner for the nice little ceremony!
    • Had a great time at the Microsoft Research Faculty Summit! Thanks to Jaime Teevan for inviting me.
    • Gave a talk at Adobe Research on Mixed Reality Prototyping. Got very useful feedback! Thanks to my host, Wilmot Li.

    June
    iGYM paper accepted to CHI PLAY 2019, wohoo team!
    • Invited to give the opening keynote at MUM 2019.
    • Attended the UIST 2019 PC. That was a lot of fun! All my papers got rejected :P

    May
    • Had a great trip to Seattle visiting friends at UW CSE, iSchool, and HCDE! Gave a DUB seminar on Prototyping Mixed Reality Experiences.
    • Also met UW Reality Lab folks.
    • Attended CHI 2019 in Glasgow! Held my CHI 2019 AR/VR prototyping course.

    April UIST submissions! Finished first time teaching my more technical AR/VR course. Had a lot of fun with A-Frame and Unity!

    January Got a Disney Research Faculty Award. This award will enable me to implement and test my XR workbench concept. I'm excited!

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    Acknowledgments

    My work at Michigan is supported by the School of Information, the Office of Academic Innovation, and the Exercise & Sport Science Initiative. It is also externally sponsored by Microsoft, Google, Lenovo, Disney, Ford, and Masco.