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Steve Feiner Announced as Keynote Speaker for the 2025 CHCI Big Ideas Workshop

March 18, 2025

Virginia Tech’s Center for Human-Computer Interaction (CHCI) invites you to our Ninth Annual Workshop on the Future of HCI, a one-day symposium bringing together researchers, faculty, and students to explore complex challenges in human-computer interaction. The event will take place on Friday, March 28, 2025, providing a unique platform for participants to propose new ideas, engage in discussions, and collaborate on shaping the future of HCI.

We are thrilled to welcome Steve Feiner as our keynote speaker. A pioneer in augmented reality (AR) and 3D user interfaces, Feiner has made important contributions to the field of HCI.

What More Can We Want?

There has been over a half century of research and development in VR and AR. While custom hardware and software prevailed in the ’60s and ’70s, commercial systems have been sold to labs since the ’80s, to ardent hobbyists since the ’90s, and now to tens of millions of others. Smart glasses are also becoming a commodity, breathlessly celebrated by technology journalists. But even as progress and publicity escalate, there is much more that must be done to fulfill and surpass the dreams of early researchers. In this talk, I will provide a personal overview of some of what “much more” entails. I will suggest directions that could be taken to improve hardware, software, and the ways we interact with them, to better address our human capabilities and needs.

Steve Feiner (Ph.D., Brown, ’87) is a Professor of Computer Science at Columbia University, where he directs the Computer Graphics and User Interfaces Lab. He has been doing AR and VR research for over 30 years, designing and evaluating novel 3D interaction and visualization techniques, creating the first outdoor AR system using a see-through head-worn display and GPS, and pioneering experimental applications of AR and VR to fields as diverse as tourism, journalism, assembly, maintenance, construction, dentistry, and medicine. Steve is a Fellow of the ACM and the IEEE, a member of the SIGCHI Academy and the IEEE VGTC VR Academy, and the recipient of the ACM SIGCHI Lifetime Research Award, the IEEE ISMAR Career Impact Award, and the IEEE VGTC Virtual Reality Career Award. He and his colleagues have won two IEEE ISMAR Paper Impact Awards, the ISWC Early Innovator Award, and the ACM UIST Lasting Impact Award.

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