Professor Eyal Ofek

School of Computer Science
Chair of Computer Science

Contact details

Telephone: +44 (0)7570 633381
Email: e.ofek@bham.ac.uk

Address: School of Computer Science
University of Birmingham
Edgbaston
Birmingham
B15 2TT
UK

Prof. Ofek research interests include usage of computer vision and sensing for Human Computer Interaction and Mixed Reality research, haptics rendering and its perception and robotics.

His contributions include the development of the world’s first time-of-flight depth camera (used by Microsoft and MagicLeap), design and development of the first street-side mapping service, development of novel algorithms for scene analysis and layout of augmented reality (used by HoloLens and Unity MARS) and more.

He has published over 100 academic papers and granted over 120 patents in the area of computer vision, HCI and location-based services.

Professor Ofek has been a principal researcher at Microsoft Research Lab (MSR) in Redmond WA, he founded MSR’s Augmented Reality research group and headed the Bing Maps research team. He served as the speciality editor of Haptics for Frontiers of Virtual Reality, a Co-paper chair of ACM SIGSPATIAL 2011, a member of IEEE CG&A editorial board, and an AC of CHI, UIST, CVPR, ISS and ISMAR

Professor Ofek was honoured as a Senior member of the ACM.

Email: e.ofek@cs.bham.ac.uk

Qualifications

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

Biography

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.

More information on Professor Ofek's research page.

Postgraduate supervision

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

Research

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.

Publications

Highlight publications

Lin, Y, Zhang, P, Ofek, E & Je, S 2024, ArmDeformation: Inducing the Sensation of Arm Deformation in Virtual Reality Using Skin-Stretching. in FF Mueller, P Kyburz, JR Williamson, C Sas, ML Wilson, PT Dugas & I Shklovski (eds), CHI '24: Proceedings of the CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems., 407, Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), CHI '24: CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, Honolulu, Hawaii, United States, 11/05/24. https://doi.org/10.1145/3613904.3642518

Kim, MJ, Ofek, E, Pahud, M, Sinclair, MJ & Bianchi, A 2024, Big or Small, It’s All in Your Head: Visuo-Haptic Illusion of Size-Change Using Finger-Repositioning. in FF Mueller, P Kyburz, JR Williamson, C Sas, ML Wilson, PT Dugas & I Shklovski (eds), CHI '24: Proceedings of the CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems., 751, Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), CHI '24: CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, Honolulu, Hawaii, United States, 11/05/24. https://doi.org/10.1145/3613904.3642254

Pacchierotti, C, Chinello, F, Koumaditis, K, Luca, MD, Ofek, E & Georgiou, O 2024, 'Guest Editorial Haptics in the Metaverse: Haptic Feedback for Virtual, Augmented, Mixed, and eXtended Realities', IEEE Transactions on Haptics, vol. 17, no. 2, 10566110, pp. 122-128. https://doi.org/10.1109/TOH.2024.3369192

Recent publications

Article

Maselli, A, Ofek, E, Cohn, B, Hinckley, K & Gonzalez-Franco, M 2023, 'Enhanced efficiency in visually guided online motor control for actions redirected towards the body midline', Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, vol. 378, no. 1869, 20210453. https://doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2021.0453

Biener, V, Gesslein, T, Schneider, D, Kawala, F, Otte, A, Kristensson, PO, Pahud, M, Ofek, E, Campos, C & Kljun, M 2022, 'Povrpoint: Authoring presentations in mobile virtual reality', IEEE transactions on visualization and computer graphics, vol. 28, no. 5, pp. 2069-2079. https://doi.org/10.1109/TVCG.2022.3150474

Biener, V, Kalamkar, S, Nouri, N, Ofek, E, Pahud, M, Dudley, JJ, Hu, J, Kristensson, PO, Weerasinghe, M & Pucihar, KČ 2022, 'Quantifying the effects of working in VR for one week', IEEE transactions on visualization and computer graphics, vol. 28, no. 11, pp. 3810-3820. https://doi.org/10.1109/TVCG.2022.3203103

Chapter

Biener, V, Ofek, E, Pahud, M, Kristensson, PO & Grubert, J 2023, Extended reality for knowledge work in everyday environments. in A Simeone, B Weyers, S Bialkova & RW Lindeman (eds), Everyday Virtual and Augmented Reality. 1 edn, Human–Computer Interaction Series, Springer, Cham, pp. 21-56. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-05804-2_2

Conference contribution

Yusuf, S, Baber, C & Ofek, E 2025, Handling Uncertainty in UAV Sensor Information using Bayesian Belief Network and Large Language Model. in SY Yurish (ed.), Drones and Unmanned Systems: Proceedings of the 1st International Conference on Drones and Unmanned Systems (DAUS' 2025) 19-21 February 2025, Granada, Spain. vol. 1, ARC Conference Proceedings, IFSA, pp. 58-61, 1st International Conference on Drones and Unmanned Systems, Granada, Spain, 19/02/25. https://doi.org/10.13140/RG.2.2.18747.94240

Hauck, S, Abdlkarim, D, Dudley, J, Kristensson, PO, Ofek, E & Grubert, J 2025, ReachVox: clutter-free reachability visualization for robot motion planning in virtual reality. in 2025 IEEE International Symposium on Mixed and Augmented Reality (ISMAR). International Symposium on Mixed and Augmented Reality (ISMAR), IEEE, pp. 1471-1478, IEEE International Symposium on Mixed and Augmented Reality , Daejeon, Korea, Republic of, 8/10/25. https://doi.org/10.1109/ISMAR67309.2025.00151

Ofek, E, Wang, CY, Stevenson Won, A, Kim, H, Gonzalez Franco, M & Panda, P 2024, AvatarPilot : Decoupling one-to-one motions from their semantics with weighted interpolations. in 2024 IEEE International Symposium on Mixed and Augmented Reality Adjunct (ISMAR-Adjunct). ISMAR, IEEE, Bellevue, WA, USA.

Ofek, E, Wang, CY, Kim, H, Panda, P, Franco, MG & Stevenson Won, A 2024, MRtransformer: Transforming Avatar Non-verbal Behavior for Remote MR Collaboration in Incongruent Spaces. in 2024 IEEE International Symposium on Mixed and Augmented Reality Adjunct (ISMAR-Adjunct). ISMAR, IEEE, Bellevue WA, USA.

Li, R, Seyed, T, Marquardt, N, Ofek, E, Hodges, S, Sinclair, M, Romat, H, Pahud, M, Sharma, J, Buxton, WAS, Hinckley, K & Riche, N 2023, AdHocProx: Sensing Mobile, Ad-Hoc Collaborative Device Formations using Dual Ultra-Wideband Radios. in CHI '23: Proceedings of the 2023 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems., 623, Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), CHI '23, Hamburg , Germany, 23/04/23. https://doi.org/10.1145/3544548.3581300

Panda, P, Nicholas, MJ, Nguyen, D, Ofek, E, Pahud, M, Rintel, S, Gonzalez-Franco, M, Hinckley, K & Lanier, J 2023, Beyond audio: Towards a design space of headphones as a site for interaction and sensing. in DIS '23: Proceedings of the 2023 ACM Designing Interactive Systems Conference. Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), pp. 904-916, DIS '23, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States, 10/07/23. https://doi.org/10.1145/3563657.3596022

Wang, CY, Nir, O, Vemprala, S, Kapoor, A, Ofek, E, McDuff, D & Gonzalez-Franco, M 2023, CityLifeSim: A High-Fidelity Pedestrian and Vehicle Simulation with Complex Behaviors. in 2022 IEEE 2nd International Conference on Intelligent Reality (ICIR). IEEE, pp. 11-16, 2022 IEEE 2nd International Conference on Intelligent Reality (ICIR), Piscataway, New Jersey, United States, 14/12/22. https://doi.org/10.1109/ICIR55739.2022.00018

Tao, Y, Wang, CY, Wilson, AD, Ofek, E & Gonzalez-Franco, M 2023, Embodying physics-aware avatars in virtual reality. in CHI '23: CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems., 254, Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), CHI '23, Hamburg , Germany, 23/04/23. https://doi.org/10.1145/3544548.3580979

Ranganeni, V, Sinclair, MJ, Ofek, E, Miller, A, Campbell, J, Kolobov, A & Cutrell, E 2023, Exploring Levels of Control for a Navigation Assistant for Blind Travelers. in HRI '23: Proceedings of the 2023 ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction. Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), pp. 4-12, HRI '23: Proceedings of the 2023 ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction
, Stockholm, Sweden, 13/03/23. https://doi.org/10.1145/3568162.3578630

Panda, P, Nicholas, MJ, Gonzalez-Franco, M, Inkpen, K, Ofek, E, Cutler, R, Hinckley, K & Lanier, J 2022, Alltogether: Effect of avatars in mixed-modality conferencing environments. in CHIWORK '22: Proceedings of the 1st Annual Meeting of the Symposium on Human-Computer Interaction for Work., 8, Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), CHIWORK 2022, Durham, New Hampshire, United States, 8/06/22. https://doi.org/10.1145/3533406.3539658

Volonte, M, Ofek, E, Jakubzak, K, Bruner, S & Gonzalez-Franco, M 2022, Headbox: A facial blendshape animation toolkit for the microsoft rocketbox library. in 2022 IEEE Conference on Virtual Reality and 3D User Interfaces Abstracts and Workshops (VRW). IEEE, pp. 39-42, 2022 IEEE Conference on Virtual Reality and 3D User Interfaces, Online, 12/03/22. https://doi.org/10.1109/VRW55335.2022.00015

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