"Oculus et Manus": Designing handheld and wearable devices that see and assist presented by Roy Shilkrot from MIT Handed devices that deliver special abilities are a mythical intercultural desire reflected in traditional and modern narratives. Nowadays, we can embed computation in existing and new hand-augmenting objects to support their innate operation and empower their operators. This talk will cover Shilkrot's work at MIT to research and create handheld and finger wearable devices that offer the user assistance and guidance. The Digital Airbrush, Finger Reader and EyeRing devices employ methods in computer graphics and computer vision to provide the user-wearer with online cues on their actions. The finger-worn devices FingerReader and EyeRing use a camera to analyze the objects at the user's fingertips and provide assistance to individuals with low vision in accessing text, symbolic languages and objects. The Digital Airbrush is a handheld smart airbrush that assists a novice painter to achieve complex creations with subtle non-visual feedback to the fingers. This talk will present how these generative concepts of an Assistive Augmentation lend themselves to many other communities in need of technological aid.

Roy is a PhD candidate in the MIT Media Lab's Fluid Interfaces group, researching new handheld and wearable devices that provide assistance. He received a B.Sc in Computer Science from Tel-Aviv College and an M.Sc in Computer Science from Tel-Aviv University in 2010 working in the Computer Graphics lab. Roy worked as an engineer and researcher both in start-up and enterprise companies in Israel and the US. His interests include but are not limited to: augmented humans, AR, assistive technology, computer vision, computer graphics and human-computer interaction/integration at large. On top of academic publications, Roy also co-authored a book (Mastering OpenCV', Packt pub. 2012), and made appearances in popular media worldwide (among them: MSNBC, Fox, Reuters, the Associated Press, RTL Germany, NHK Japan, MBC Korea). Roy also likes to be outside, preferably near large moving bodies of water, ask him about that!