Facing Interaction

  • Tomás Laurenzo | Microsoft Research Intern

How can we communicate sensations and emotional states, in non-verbal ways, to others, ourselves, things, or even places? Under the assumptions that facial gestures are a sound window to somebody’s emotion, we constructed different art pieces and interactive prototypes that comprise different communication channels (haptic, visual, aural), and aim to help reflecting on communication itself, its poetry, and ourselves. This work was created with Qin Cai during my 2012 internship at MSR.

Speaker Details

Tomás Laurenzo is an artist, designer, researcher and computer engineer, born and based in Montevideo, Uruguay. He works mainly in the new media art and human-computer interaction fields, tending to include new technologies in the artworks and tools that he creates. He is Associate Professor, at the Computer Science dept. of the Universidad de la República, in Uruguay, where he is leads the Laboratorio de medios (medialab) of the Engineering School, as well as being Associate Researcher at the Center for Basic Research of the School of Psychology, Visiting Professor at the School of Architecture, and Researcher at Uruguay’s National Agency of Research (ANII).

He is a Ph.D. candidate working under the advised of Dr. Alvaro Cassinelli (University of Tokyo), and as such he was awarded the Microsoft Research Fellowship Award in 2011. He also was a visiting scholar at CMU in 2009, Guest Lecturer at Brunel University London in 2011, and a research intern at MSR in 2011.

More information at http://laurenzo.net

Series: Microsoft Research Talks