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 designing and building content creation tools for end-users to craft immersive experiences, including Augmented Reality (AR) and Virtual Reality (VR). By exploring novel techniques to augment people's creativity, collaboration, and communication, his research aims to enable anyone to easily create and personalize content in the era of spatial computing.
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. Outside of work, Lei is passionate about music production, skateboards, and 35mm film photography. He is introverted.
Contact: raynez@umich.edu
Publications
Jigsaw: Authoring Immersive Storytelling Experiences with Augmented Reality and Internet of Things
VRGit: A Version Control System for Collaborative Content Creation in Virtual Reality
Auggie: Encouraging Effortful Communication through Handcrafted Digital Experiences
Studying the Benefits and Challenges of Immersive Dataflow Programming
Cubicle: An Adaptive Educational Gaming Platform for Training Spatial Visualization Skills
News
05/2024: I'll present Jigsaw at CHI 2024.
04/2024: I'm joining NJIT as an Assistant Professor in Spring 2025, after a one-term postdoc at Princeton's Computer Science.