Doctoral student from Saarbrücken wins prestigious Google fellowship

Arata Jingu, PhD student in the Human-Computer Interaction Lab at Saarland University. Photo: Philipp Zapf-Schramm

Arata Jingu, a PhD student in Professor Jürgen Steimle’s Human-Computer Interaction Lab at Saarland University, has been awarded a Google PhD Fellowship. These prestigious fellowships are awarded annually to researchers worldwide who are making outstanding and innovative contributions to computer science and related disciplines.

Arata Jingu is a researcher in the field of Mixed Reality (MR). MR is about integrating digital elements into the physical world and making them experienceable through human perception. Arata Jingu’s research has focused on the sense of touch. The form factor of the devices that are to generate the haptic sensations is particularly important to his research. ‘I want to develop devices that end-users can enjoy expressive haptic experiences while restricting the user’s freedom of movement as little as possible,’ explains Arata Jingu. 

A key challenge of his research is thus to develop haptic devices that are as small and compact as possible. As part of his doctoral thesis, he developed a method in which an ultra-thin membrane is applied to the skin. This membrane emits precise electrical impulses that stimulate the subdermal sensory nerves directly, thus triggering the sense of touch. ‘We can manufacture this device using a printer, conductive ink and flexible, printable circuits,’ says Arata Jingu. Using this production method, he has explored various form factors for the devices and developed innovative approaches that can be used, for example, to add new, artificially generated haptic sensations to real objects.

Professor Jürgen Steimle says: “Arata Jingu’s work is a valuable contribution to our European Research Council-funded project ‘Feel-XR: Feel-through Haptic Feedback for Augmented and Virtual Reality’. It is precisely these developments that this project aims to explore in terms of their marketability”.

The Google PhD fellowship program is advertised internationally every year. In the 2024 funding round, only around 70 doctoral students worldwide were selected. Arata Jingu received the funding in the area of ‘Human-Computer Interaction and Visualization’. In addition to financial support, the scholarship also includes the opportunity to work with a scientist from Google’s research department.

In the 2024 funding round, only around 70 doctoral students were selected worldwide, three of whom come from German universities.

More Information:
https://hci.cs.uni-saarland.de/
https://research.google/programs-and-events/phd-fellowship/recipients/
https://ajingu.github.io/

Editor:
Philipp Zapf-Schramm Max Planck Institute for Informatics Tel: +49 681 9325 5409 E-Mail: pzs@mpi-inf.mpg.de