Main
Hello. I’m Lei (Rayne) Zhang.
I am a second year Ph.D. student at University of Michigan, School of Information, luckily advised by Professor Steve Oney.
My research interests lie primarily in the fields of Human-Computer Interaction, Virtual/Augmented Reality, and Authoring & Programming Tools. Recently, I am doing research in immersive authoring in Virtual Reality to enable novices to easily build the VR world while immersed in VR. I am generally interested in building interactive VR & AR systems in order to enhance people’s creativity, productivity, communication, etc.
Previously, 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. I have also conducted research in the Computer Science Department at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
In my leisure time, I am addicted to making music. Check out some of my songs here.
I am looking for research internships in 2021. Please reach out if you find my research or side-projects related.
Publications
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.
