Lauren Wang

Princeton CS Student | HCI researcher

I am a 1st year Computer Science PhD student doing research with the Princeton HCI Group, advised by Prof. Parastoo Abtahi. I completed my undergrad in Electrical Engineering at the National Taiwan University.

My current research work spans VR/AR, HRI, and multimodal input, with a focus on creating immersive experiences that blend virtuality and reality. I am grateful for the Grace Hopper Scholarship and the Yu-Lin Scholarship support.

In my free time, I enjoy drawing, baking, and 3D modeling :)

News

Oct 30, 2023	Presented AirCharge at UIST. Talk available now!
Nov 1, 2022	Presented UltraBat at UIST SIC. Super excited to attend my first conference!

Selected Publications

AirCharge: Amplifying Ungrounded Impact Force by Accumulating Air Propulsion Momentum

Po-Yu Chen*, Ching-Yi Tsai*, Wei-Hsin Wang*, and 5 more authors

In Proceedings of the 36th Annual ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology, 2023

Abs Link Video

Impact events, which generate directional forces with extremely short impulse durations and large force magnitudes, are prevalent in both virtual reality (VR) games and real-world experiences. However, despite recent advancement in ungrounded force feedback technologies, such as air jet propulsion and propellers, these technologies remain 5-100x weaker and 10-500x slower compared to real-world impact events. For instance, they can only achieve 4N with a minimal duration of 50-500ms compared to the 20-400N forces generated within 1-5ms for baseball, ping-pong, drumming, and tennis. To overcome these limitations, we present AirCharge, a novel haptic device that accumulates air propulsion momentum to generate instantaneous, directional impact forces. By mounting compressed air jets on rotating swingarms, AirCharge can amplify impact force magnitude by more than 10x while matching real-world impulse duration of 3ms. To support high-frequency impacts, we explored and evaluated a series of device designs, culminating in a novel reciprocating dual-swingarm design that leverages a reversing bevel gearbox to eliminate gyro effects and to achieve impact feedback of up to 10Hz. User experience evaluation (n = 16) showed that AirCharge significantly enhanced realism and is preferred by participants compared to air jets without the charging mechanism.
UltraBat: An Interactive 3D Side-Scrolling Game Using Ultrasound Levitation

Wei-Hsin Wang, Hong-En Chen, and Mike Y. Chen

In Adjunct Proceedings of the 35th Annual ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology, 2022

Abs Link Video

We present UltraBat, an interactive 3D side-scrolling game inspired by Flappy Bird, in which the game character, a bat, is physically levitated in mid-air using ultrasound. Players aim to navigate the bat through a stalagmite tunnel that scrolls to one side as the bat travels, which is implemented using a pin-array display to create a shape-changing passage.