Bio

Misha Sra is a Research Affiliate at the MIT Media Lab working with Prof Pattie Maes. She

graduated in June 2018 from the MIT Media Lab having done her PhD under the direction of

Prof Pattie Maes in the Fluid Interfaces Group. Misha’s work asks the question: how can new

technologies allow users to interact with digital content in the most natural way? Her work is

published at the most selective HCI and VR venues such as ACM CHI, UIST, VRST and IEEE

VR where she has received several best paper awards and honorable mentions for her work. From

2014-2015, she was a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation wellbeing research fellow at the MIT

Media Lab. In spring 2016, she received the Silver Award in the annual Edison Awards global

competition that honors excellence in human-centered design and innovation. She is a TEDx

speaker and was recently selected as a Rising Star in EECS by MIT. Her work has captured

the interest of media such as, MIT Tech Review, Discovery Channel, Techradar, UploadVR and

Engadget.

Research

I graduated with a PhD in 2018 from the MIT Media Lab where I worked in the Fluid Interfaces group with Pattie Maes.

If we think about the distance between the real and the digital, it is clearest at the interface layer. The ways that our bodies interact with the physical world are elaborate and rich while digital interactions are far more limited. I build systems and devices that use the entire body for input and output to enable natural and even implicit interactions. I call my concept Perceptual Engineering -- a way to alter the user’s perception (or more specifically the input signals to their perception) and manipulate it in subtle ways. For example, I build systems and devices that modify a user’s sense of space, place, body, balance and orientation, and manipulate their visual attention and more, all without the user’s explicit input, and in order to assist or guide their interactive experience in an effortless way.

TEDx talk (October 2018) on remote controlling human beings using galvanic vestibular stimulation (GVS). Article about my work in Forbes India -- Fresh off the (MIT Media) Lab (April 2019)