Meet the award recipients of the first Microsoft HoloLens academic research grants
Chosen from more than 500 qualified applications, three faculty members from the UC Berkeley Robotics and Intelligent Machines Lab have won one of five academic research grants from Microsoft Research.
Dr. Allen Y. Yang and Professors Claire Tomlin and Shankar Sastry will lead this research effort. From the Virtual Reality @ Berkeley Club, EECS undergraduate student Rohit Swamy will also lead a team of more than 10 undergraduate students to develop augmented reality solutions for drones with the principal investigators’ research groups.
As described on the Microsoft Research Outreach Blog, the team’s project focuses on a search and rescue system dubbed Immersive Semi-Autonomous Aerial Command System (ISAACS): “One California team wants to use Microsoft HoloLens to help develop better ways for pilots to ‘drive’ autonomous aerial vehicles. They imagine that one of the first applications of this project would be used to search for survivors after some sort of calamity. The pilot would use Microsoft HoloLens to control multiple vehicles in a collaboration that includes the augmented reality possible with the lens. One of the goals of this project is to provide people who don’t have much drone-flying experience the opportunity to pilot the fleet via a human-robot interface.”
Reposted from Microsoft Windows Blogs | November 11, 2015 | by Alex Kipman
Meet the award recipients of the first Microsoft HoloLens academic research grants
Today, we’re excited to announce the award recipients of the Microsoft HoloLens Academic Research Grant Program. Earlier this year, we challenged academic institutions to submit their ideas to harness the potential of Microsoft HoloLens and push the boundaries of possible applications for holographic computing.
The submissions exceeded our expectations, not only in volume, but in the diversity of institutions and the quality of the proposals. We were blown away to observe such creative, compelling and promising academic applications for HoloLens across art, medicine, visualization, education and more. From leveraging HoloLens to correct for visual impairment to mobilizing mixed reality in the classroom for trade-based education, the submissions truly capture the spirit of the program and point to the scope of what’s possible with Microsoft HoloLens.
Congratulations to the five winning institutions, all of whom will receive $100,000 and two Microsoft HoloLens Development Edition devices with which to conduct their research. However, settling on just five award recipients was a nearly impossible task owing to the sheer quality of submissions. Therefore, we’ve decided to also provide five runners up with two Microsoft HoloLens Development Edition devices each so that they may continue their outstanding work.
Microsoft HoloLens Academic Research Grant Award Recipients
Award Recipients
- Golan Levin, The Frank-Ratchye STUDIO, Carnegie Mellon University: Open-Source Investigations in Mixed Reality
- Emily Cooper, Wojciech Jarosz and Xing-Dong Yang, Dartmouth College: Augmenting Reality for the Visually Impaired with Microsoft HoloLens
- Joseph Gabbard and Doug Bowman, Virginia Tech: Collaborative Analysis of Large-scale Mixed Reality Data
Andy Mingo, Tawny Schlieski, Nikki Dunsire, Shelley Midthun, J Bills, Clackamas Community College & Intel, HoloLens Curriculum for Trade-based Education - Allen Yang, Professor Claire Tomlin, and Shankar Sastry, University of California, Berkeley: Immersive Semi-Autonomous Aerial Command System (ISAACS)
Runners up
- Lori C. Walters, Eileen Smith, Fran Blumberg, Robert Michlowitz, Alexia Mandeville, University of Central Florida: Memory Lens: A Dynamic Tool for Capturing Societal Memory
- Wen Liu, The University of Kansas: Stroke Rehabilitation
- Preeti Gupta, American Museum of Natural History: DinoLens: Seeing an Unseen Past
- Pamela Jennings, Center for Design Innovation: CONSTRUKTS: Augmenting design processes with interactive holograms using the Microsoft HoloLens
- Carol LaFayette and Frederic I. Parke, Texas A&M University: Extending the range of human senses: Ultraviolet and ultrasonic perception with Microsoft HoloLens
It’s so exciting to see the academic community respond to Microsoft HoloLens with such enthusiasm, and we suspect this is only the beginning.
We cannot wait to follow along as our award recipients and others continue this journey and pave the road ahead for the new frontier of holographic computing. And we encourage developers to apply for the Microsoft HoloLens Development Edition. We are looking for creative developers to help us build an active, dynamic community. Come build the holographic future with us.