Hrvoje Benko
Affiliate Professor | University of Washington
Biography
Dr. Hrvoje Benko is a Director of Research Science at Meta Reality Labs Research where he is developing novel interactions, devices and interfaces for Contextualized AI, Augmented and Virtual Reality. He is leading the efforts to invent novel wearable devices that enable people to use their gestures, gaze and voice to express themselves while harnessing the contextualized understanding of their environment for better interactions.
He is an expert in the fields of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), Augmented Reality (AR) and Virtual Reality (VR) where he has coauthored more than 80 scientific articles and 70 issued patents. He has developed techniques for retargeting haptics by leveraging dynamic VR illusions, invented numerous handheld and wristband input and haptic devices, created room-scale, interactive, projection-based Augmented Reality environments, as well as championed the idea and the first implementations of multitouch interactions on any surface via wearable depth cameras, thus enabling touch interactions for both Augmented and Virtual Reality scenarios. For the latter, he has received the ACM UIST Lasting Impact Award in 2022 for his co-authored work "OmniTouch: Wearable Multitouch Interaction Everywhere". His research has been awarded 13 best paper awards or honorable mentions at the top HCI conferences and he has been active in the organization of the ACM User Interface Software and Technology conference, the premiere technical conference in HCI, serving as the program chair in 2012 and as the general chair in 2014. Between 2014 and 2024, he served on the editorial board of the TOCHI Journal, the premiere journal in the HCI field.
He also holds an Affiliate Full Professor position at the University of Washington Information School. Prior to his role at Meta, he was a Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research, where he worked on novel haptic handheld devices, multi-touch interactions, large-scale projection-mapping environments, and novel AR/VR interactions and technologies. He received a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Columbia University in 2007 investigating mobile augmented reality and multi-touch interactive technologies. For his research contributions, he was inducted into the SIGCHI Academy (Class of 2023), and the IEEE VTCG Virtual Reality Academy (Class of 2026).