Professor Eyal Ofek

Senior member of the Assoc. of Computing Machines (ACM).

Professor Ofek is a chair of computer Science at the University of Birmingham. 

His research focused on using sensing and scene understanding for Human-Computer Interaction and using sensing and Mixed Reality (MR), enabling better collaboration and more inclusive workspace. He has been granted over 120 patents and published over 100 academic publications at leading venues, cited by more than 17000 publications.  

Prior to joining the University, Eyal was a principal researcher at Microsoft Research (2004-2023) and developing AI for autonomous firefighting drone. 

Professor Ofek formed and led a new MR research group at Microsoft Research. He envisions MR applications as weaved with the fabric of our lives rather than PC and mobile apps, limited to running on a specific device’s screen. Such applications must be aware of users’ changing physical and social contexts and be flexible to adapt accordingly. We developed systems such as FLARE (Fast Layout for AR experiences) used by the HoloLens Team and Unity MARS product, or Triton 3D audio simulation used by Microsoft Games and is the base of Microsoft Acoustics.  

Eyal formed the Bing Maps & Mobile Research Lab. We combined generated many novel results, impacting the product while generating world-class computer vision and graphics research. Among our results is the development of the influential text detector technology used by the Bing Mobile app and incorporated into OpenCV, the world’s first street-side imagery service, street-level reconstruction of geometry and texture pipeline, novel texture compression used by Bing Maps, and more. 

He oversaw software and algorithms R&D of the world’s first time-of-flight video camera in a startup company and used our depth cameras for applications such as TV depth keying, and camera-based gaming. The depth camera was later evolved to be included in the Microsoft HoloLens and MagicLeap HMDs. Another company he formed developed the popular Amiga PhotonPaint editor. 

Eyal is a senior member of the ACM. He was the paper chair of ACM SIGSPATIAL 2011, the haptics editor of Frontiers in VR and member of the editorial board of IEEE CG&A. He serves on conference committees such as CVPR, CHI, UIST, ISMAR, and ISS. 

Eyal has released multiple tools and open-source libraries such as the RoomAlive Toolkit [RoomAliveToolkit23], used around the world for multi-projection systems, SeeingVR to enhance the use of VR for people with low vision, Microsoft Rocketbox avatars, MoveBox [MoveBox23] and HeadBox toolkits to democratize avatar animation, and RemoteLab for distributed user studies. 

Doctoral Supervision: in areas of HCI, Sensing, Vision and Mixed reality

The modern workspace increases the demands on remote workers. Working on the go and in makeshift offices, Workers must establish their work interfaces in a variety of less-than-perfect environments. Collaboration from afar, separated by screens and lacking the support of body gestures cues, and the common shared physical environment they enjoyed during in-person collaboration is a great challenge.  

Professor Ofek's research examined the context of users and generate smart applications that adapts to a variation of the users’ environments, physical and social context, people's physical capabilities, and more. His past research has generated adaptive AR layout technology incorporated into industry tools such as the Unity game engine and Microsoft HoloLens.

Eyal's work is aimed to level the plain field between collaborators that difference not just by distance but also by physical capabilities, availability of devices, and time differences, making a more inclusive workspace.

His research involves multiple disciplines including computer Vision, graphics, mixed reality, HCI and haptics.