About

Lei Zhang is a Ph.D. candidate at University of Michigan, School of Information, advised by Professor Steve Oney and Professor Anhong Guo. His research in human-computer interaction focuses on building authoring tools that enable end-users to craft immersive experiences, such as Augmented Reality (AR) and Virtual Reality (VR). By developing interactive systems, his work explores techniques that leverage computation and interaction to empower people's creativity, collaboration, and communication in the context of content creation.

Lei’s work has been published at top-tier HCI venues including CHI, UIST, and CSCW. His first-authored papers have received a best paper award at CSCW 2022 and a best short paper award at VL/HCC 2019. Lei interned at Snap Research twice (Summer 2021 & 2022), working with Dr. Andrés Monroy-Hernández, Dr. Rajan Vaish, and Dr. Fannie Liu. He holds a BE in Software Engineering from Shanghai Jiao Tong University. In his leisure time, Lei is into music production, skateboards, and 35mm film photography.

Contact: raynez@umich.edu

Publications

VRGit: A Version Control System for Collaborative Content Creation in Virtual Reality

Lei Zhang, Ashutosh Agrawal, Steve Oney, Anhong Guo.

CHI 2023

PDF ACM DL Video

We introduce VRGit, a new version control system for collaborative content creation in VR. VRGit enables novel visualization and interactions for version control commands such as history navigation, commits, branching, previewing, and re-using. VRGit is also designed to facilitate real-time collaboration by providing awareness of users’ activities and version history through concepts of portals and shared history visualizations.

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.

CSCW 2022 (🏆 Best Paper Award)

PDF ACM DL Video

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

PDF ACM DL Video

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

Lei Zhang and Steve Oney.

VL/HCC 2019 (🏆 Best Short Paper Award)

PDF IEEE Xplore

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

Ziang Xiao, Helen Wauck, Zeya Peng, Hanfei Ren, Lei Zhang, Shiliang Zuo, Yuqi Yao, and Wai-Tat Fu

IUI 2018

PDF ACM DL

In this paper, 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.