Practical and Rich User Digitization
Karan Ahuja
A long-standing vision in computer science has been to evolve computing
devices into proactive assistants that enhance our productivity, health and
wellness, and many other facets of our lives. User digitization is crucial in
achieving this vision as it allows computers to intimately understand their
users, capturing activity, pose, routine, and behavior. Today's consumer
devices - like smartphones and smartwatches provide a glimpse of this
potential, offering coarse digital representations of users with metrics such
as step count, heart rate, and a handful of human activities like running and
biking. Even these very low-dimensional representations are already bringing
value to millions of people's lives, but there is significant potential for
improvement. On the other end, professional, high-fidelity comprehensive user
digitization systems exist. For example, motion capture suits and multi-camera
rigs that digitize our full body and appearance, and scanning machines such as
MRI capture our detailed anatomy. However, these carry significant user
practicality burdens, such as financial, privacy, ergonomic, aesthetic, and
instrumentation considerations, that preclude consumer use. In general, the
higher the fidelity of capture, the lower the user's practicality. Most
conventional approaches strike a balance between user practicality and
digitization fidelity.
  My research aims to break this trend, developing sensing systems that
increase user digitization fidelity to create new and powerful computing
experiences while retaining or even improving user practicality and
accessibility, allowing such technologies to have a societal impact. Armed with
such knowledge, our future devices could offer longitudinal health tracking,
more productive work environments, full body avatars in extended reality, and
embodied telepresence experiences, to name just a few domains.