PowVRtool: a handheld haptic device for realistic power tool feedback in VR-based manufacturing training

PowVRtool: a handheld haptic device for realistic power tool feedback in VR-based manufacturing training

Mayank Patel, Asim Unmesh, Ananya Ipsita, Levi Erickson, Priyam Maheshwari, Rahul Jain, Jingyu Shi, Laura H Blumenschein, Karthik Ramani
Virtual Reality 30, 16 (2026)

In VR-based manufacturing training employing Oculus controllers for power tool operation, users consistently encounter a glaring impediment: the conspicuous absence of haptic feedback. This critical shortfall significantly hinders the seamless...

Extended Reality in Industry and Healthcare: Current Trends and Future Perspectives

Extended Reality in Industry and Healthcare: Current Trends and Future Perspectives

Beatrice Aruanno, Monica Bordegoni, Marina Carulli, Giorgio Colombo, Marco Rossoni, Tsz Ho Kwok, Theodore Lim, Hugo I Medellin-Castillo, Karthik Ramani, Daniele Regazzoni, Caterina Rizzi, Andrea Vitali
Journal of Computing and Information Science in Engineering. Dec 2025, 25(12): 120806

Extended reality (XR) technologies are no longer peripheral innovations but emerging cornerstones of human–technology interaction across critical sectors. This article takes the position that engineering and healthcare represent the most mature and...

Occlusion-Aware Temporally Consistent Amodal Completion for 3D Human-Object Interaction Reconstruction

Occlusion-Aware Temporally Consistent Amodal Completion for 3D Human-Object Interaction Reconstruction

Hyungjun Doh, Dong In Lee, Seunggeun Chi, Pin-Hao Huang, Kwonjoon Lee, Sangpil Kim, Karthik Ramani
In Proceedings of the 33rd ACM International Conference on Multimedia

We introduce a novel framework for reconstructing dynamic human-object interactions from monocular video that overcomes challenges associated with occlusions and temporal inconsistencies. Traditional 3D reconstruction methods typically assume...

agentAR: Creating Augmented Reality Applications with Tool-Augmented LLM-based Autonomous Agents

agentAR: Creating Augmented Reality Applications with Tool-Augmented LLM-based Autonomous Agents

Chenfei Zhu, Shao-Kang Hsia, Xiyun Hu, Ziyi Liu, Jingyu Shi, Karthik Ramani
In Proceedings of the 38th Annual ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology (UIST '25).

Creating Augmented Reality (AR) applications requires expertise in both design and implementation, posing significant barriers to entry for non-expert users. While existing methods reduce some of this burden, they often fall short in flexibility or...

DesignFromX:Empowering Consumer-Driven Design Space Exploration through Feature Composition of Referenced Products

DesignFromX:Empowering Consumer-Driven Design Space Exploration through Feature Composition of Referenced Products

Runlin Duan, Chenfei Zhu, Yuzhao Chen, Yichen Hu, Jingyu Shi, Karthik Ramani
In Proceedings of the 2025 ACM Designing Interactive Systems Conference

Industrial products are designed to satisfy the needs of consumers. The rise of generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) enables consumers to easily modify a product by prompting a generative model, opening up opportunities to incorporate...

GesPrompt: Leveraging Co-Speech Gestures to Augment LLM-Based Interaction in Virtual Reality

GesPrompt: Leveraging Co-Speech Gestures to Augment LLM-Based Interaction in Virtual Reality

Xiyun Hu, Dizhi Ma, Fengming He, Zhengzhe Zhu, Shao-Kang Hsia, Chenfei Zhu, Ziyi Liu, Karthik Ramani
In Proceedings of the 2025 ACM Designing Interactive Systems Conference

Large Language Model (LLM)-based copilots have shown great potential in Extended Reality (XR) applications. However, the user faces challenges when describing the 3D environments to the copilots due to the complexity of conveying spatial-temporal...

Adopting Backward Design into a Constructionist Curriculum Design for IoT Skill Development in High Schoolers

Adopting Backward Design into a Constructionist Curriculum Design for IoT Skill Development in High Schoolers

Ananya Ipsita, Terrell Kendall Glenn, Disha Ajay Bhagwat, Nielsen Pereira, Kylie A Peppler, Karthik Ramani
In Proceedings of the Extended Abstracts of the CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, pp. 1-8. 2025.

Despite the growing demand for experienced Internet of Things (IoT) professionals across industrial establishments, most secondary education institutions do not offer a curriculum to empower students’ knowledge and skills in IoT. Enrichment...

Transparent Barriers: Natural Language Access Control Policies for XR-Enhanced Everyday Objects

Transparent Barriers: Natural Language Access Control Policies for XR-Enhanced Everyday Objects

Kentaro Taninaka, Rahul Jain, Jingyu Shi, Kazunori Takashio, Karthik Ramani
In Proceedings of the 2025 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems

Extended Reality (XR)-enabled headsets that overlay digital content onto the physical world, are gradually finding their way into our daily life. This integration raises significant concerns about privacy and access control, especially in shared...

CARING-AI: Towards Authoring Context-aware Augmented Reality INstruction through Generative Artificial Intelligence

CARING-AI: Towards Authoring Context-aware Augmented Reality INstruction through Generative Artificial Intelligence

Jingyu Shi*, Rahul Jain*, Seung-gun Chi*, Hyungjun Doh, Hyung-gun Chi, Alexander J. Quinn and Karthik Ramani
CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI ’25)

Context-aware AR instruction enables adaptive and in-situ learning experiences. However, hardware limitations and expertise requirements constrain the creation of such instructions. With recent developments in Generative Artificial Intelligence...

Virtual Reality in Manufacturing Education: A Scoping Review Indicating State-of-the-Art, Benefits, and Challenges Across Domains, Levels, and Entities

Virtual Reality in Manufacturing Education: A Scoping Review Indicating State-of-the-Art, Benefits, and Challenges Across Domains, Levels, and Entities

Ananya Ipsita, Ramesh Kaki, Ziyi Liu, Mayank Patel, Runlin Duan, Lakshmi Deshpande, Lin-Ping Yuan, Victoria Lowell, Ashok Maharaj, Kylie Peppler, Steven Feiner, Karthik Ramani
Preprint submitted to Elsevier

To address the shortage of a skilled workforce in the U.S. manufacturing industry, immersive Virtual Reality (VR)-based training solutions hold promising potential. To effectively utilize VR to meet workforce demands, it is important to understand...

Visualizing Causality in Mixed Reality for Manual Task Learning: A Study

Visualizing Causality in Mixed Reality for Manual Task Learning: A Study

Rahul Jain*, Jingyu Shi*, Andrew Benton; Moiz Rasheed; Hyungjun Doh; Subramanian Chidambaram and Karthik Ramani
IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics

Mixed Reality (MR) is gaining prominence in manual task skill learning due to its in-situ, embodied, and immersive experience. To teach manual tasks, current methodologies break the task into hierarchies (tasks into subtasks) and visualize not only...

Investigating Creativity in Humans and Generative AI Through Circles Exercises

Investigating Creativity in Humans and Generative AI Through Circles Exercises

Runlin Duan, Shao-Kang Hsia, Yuzhao Chen, Yichen Hu, Ming Yin, Karthik Ramani
Preprint

Generative AI (GenAI) is transforming the creativity process. However, as presented in this paper, GenAI encounters "narrow creativity" barriers. We observe that both humans and GenAI focus on limited subsets of the design space. We investigate...

CATSplat: Context-Aware Transformer with Spatial Guidance for Generalizable 3D Gaussian Splatting from A Single-View Image

CATSplat: Context-Aware Transformer with Spatial Guidance for Generalizable 3D Gaussian Splatting from A Single-View Image

Wonseok Roh, Hwanhee Jung, Jong Wook Kim, Seunggwan Lee, Innfarn Yoo, Andreas Lugmayr, Seunggeun Chi, Karthik Ramani, Sangpil Kim

Recently, generalizable feed-forward methods based on 3D Gaussian Splatting have gained significant attention for their potential to reconstruct 3D scenes using finite resources. These approaches create a 3D radiance field, parameterized by...