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Hello. I’m Lei Zhang.
I am a Ph.D. student at University of Michigan, School of Information, luckily advised by Professor Steve Oney and Professor Anhong Guo.
My research interests lie primarily in the area of Human-Computer Interaction, Virtual/Augmented Reality, and End-user Programming. More specifically, I do research in building systems and interaction techniques that enable novices, namely people with little to no technical background, to easily create content in VR & AR.
Previously, I have interned at Snap Research (twice!), working with Dr. Andrés Monroy-Hernández, Dr. Rajan Vaish, and Dr. Fannie Liu. I was an undergraduate in the School of Software at Shanghai Jiao Tong University. I was a research member at the Digital ART Lab of Shanghai Jiao Tong University, supervised by Prof. Xubo Yang and Prof. Shuangjiu Xiao. During undergrad, I also worked as a research intern at the Computer Science Department in University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
In my leisure time, I am a rapper & producer (semi-pro) and a skateboarder (beginner). Check out some of my music on 网易云音乐, Spotify, or here.
Publications
Auggie: Encouraging Effortful Communication through Handcrafted Digital Experiences
Lei Zhang*, Tianying Chen*, Olivia Seow*, Tim Chong, Sven Kratz, Yu Jiang Tham, Andrés Monroy-Hernández, Rajan Vaish, and Fannie Liu. (To appear at CSCW 2022)
Digital communication is often brisk and automated. From auto-completed messages to “likes,” research has shown that such lightweight interactions can affect perceptions of authenticity and closeness. On the other hand, effort in relationships can forge emotional bonds by conveying a sense of caring and is essential in building and maintaining relationships. To explore effortful communication, we designed and evaluated Auggie, an iOS app that encourages partners to create digitally handcrafted Augmented Reality (AR) experiences for each other.
FlowMatic: An Immersive Authoring Tool for Creating Interactive Scenes in Virtual Reality
Lei Zhang and Steve Oney (UIST 2020)
In this paper, we introduces FlowMatic, an immersive authoring tool that raises the ceiling of expressiveness by allowing novice programmers to specify reactive behavior.
Studying the Benefits and Challenges of Immersive Dataflow Programming
In this paper, we study the benefits and challenges of immersive dataflow authoring, a paradigm that allows users to build VR applications using dataflow notation while immersed in the VR world.
Cubicle: An Adaptive Educational Gaming Platform for Training Spatial Visualization Skills
We study gamification as a way to motivate first year engineering students to take part in an online workshop designed to train their spatial visualization skills. Our game contains eight modules, each designed to train a different component of spatial visualization.
Find more side-projects I have done here.
