What inspires you today?

A: It’s a cliche perhaps but I love to “think outside the box” in various things I work on. For example, I am inspired by new methods for sensing physical phenomena in the real world—methods that do so indirectly via inference from various signal behaviors. It’s really exciting because there is a hope of sensing things we cannot directly observe, e.g., the hidden “back side” of someone’s hand or head. I am also inspired by the new opportunities to move from fundamental VR/AR technology research to actually using the technology to explore some of the things that originally drew me to VR/AR. For so long we (researchers) had to work very hard to make even the most rudimentary system work well enough to simply demonstrate something. But in the last 10 years or so, for several reasons, we have seen the explosion (and I don’t think that’s an overstatement) of turnkey off-the-shelf systems for VR and AR.