Abstract

Did you as a child ever dream of having extra senses like X-ray vision, enhancing your body with additional limbs such as a third arm, or playing with invisible characters on a field? Human augmentation is an interdisciplinary field of research that focuses on methods, technologies, and their applications to enhance human sensory, motor, or cognitive abilities. This field encompasses a wide range of applications, driven by advancements in technologies such as prosthetics, implants, exoskeletons, brain-computer interfaces, and wearable devices. Human augmentation may thus provide the means to realize aforementioned dreams. However, to achieve this, research is necessary to understand the impact of human augmentation. It is also crucial to explore how humans would interact, play, or learn with these enhancements once they become a reality. This presentation begins by defining human augmentation. It then discusses recent projects aimed at understanding, playing with, and learning through human augmentation, before concluding with an outlook on future work in this field. 

Bio

Stephan Lukosch is a professor at the HIT Lab NZ of the University of Canterbury in Christchurch, New Zealand. Before joining the HIT Lab NZ in 2019, he was an Associate Professor at the Faculty of Technology, Policy and Management of the Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands. He received a Dr. rer. nat. in Computer Science with distinction from the University of Hagen in Germany. His current research focuses on human augmentation to enhance our senses, skills or experiences. Can we, e.g., use human augmentation to sense that someone needs our help, to help us acquire new skills, or to let us experience remote places as if being there? He explores the effect of human augmentation in combination with applied games or in applied scenarios such as sports, health, safety & security, and engineering. For that purpose, he evaluates human augmentation with regard to human factors on acceptance, engagement and experience of human augmentation