Daniel Leithinger

Daniel Leithinger is a Design Tech Innovation Fellow at Cornell University. His research and teaching in Human Computer Interaction focus on physical shape-changing interfaces and spaces. Guided by a vision of computing in which humans engage with computers through their whole body, Leithinger and his students invent robotic interface technologies, study how designers engage with them, and prototype novel applications.

Leithinger received his Ph.D. at the MIT Media Lab in 2015 and his BSc and MSc at the Upper Austria University of Applied Sciences in Hagenberg, Austria, in 2005 and 2007. From 2018–2023, Leithinger was an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at the University of Colorado at Boulder, leading the THING Lab at the ATLAS Institute. In 2015, he cofounded Lumii (now Fathom Optics) to develop glasses-free 3D display technologies. His projects have been presented at venues like ACM TEI, UIST, CHI, DIS, SIGGRAPH, Ars Electronica, and the Cooper Hewitt National Design Museum. Widely featured in international news, his work has received awards by Fast Company, A' Design, Red Dot, Core 77, IDEA, RTT, SIGGRAPH, and Laval Virtual.

Academic Research/Specialty Areas

  • Digital media
  • Technology and art

Related News

Classes (Selected)

  • DESIGN 6397: Design for Physical Interaction I

Awards, Grants, and Fellowships (Selected)

  • Mass Challenge Accelerator: Gold Award Startup (2015)
  • A' Design Award (2015)
  • Fast Company Innovation by Design Award (2014)
  • Red Dot Award: Design Concept (2014)
  • IDEA Award: Bronze Winner (2014)

Exhibitions and Presentations (Selected)

  • Amazing in Motion: LEXUS DESIGN AMAZING at Milan Design Week, Italy (2014)
  • RADICAL ATOMS — and the alchemists of our time at Ars Electronica, Austria (2016)

Publications (Selected)

  • Zhou, R., Schwemler, Z., Baweja, A., Sareen, H., Hunt, C.L. and Leithinger, D., 2023, April. Tactorbots: a haptic design toolkit for out-of-lab exploration of emotional robotic touch. In Proceedings of the 2023 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (pp. 1–19).
  • Suzuki, R., Hedayati, H., Zheng, C., Bohn, J.L., Szafir, D., Do, E.Y.L., Gross, M.D. and Leithinger, D., 2020, April. Roomshift: Room-scale dynamic haptics for VR with furniture-moving swarm robots. In Proceedings of the 2020 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (pp. 1–11).
  • Follmer, S., Leithinger, D., Olwal, A., Hogge, A., & Ishii, H., 2013, October. inFORM: dynamic physical affordances and constraints through shape and object actuation. In Uist (Vol. 13, No. 10, pp. 2501–988).
  • Follmer, S., Leithinger, D., Olwal, A., Cheng, N., & Ishii, H., 2012, October. Jamming user interfaces: programmable particle stiffness and sensing for malleable and shape-changing devices. In Proceedings of the 25th annual ACM symposium on User interface software and technology (pp. 519–528).
Close overlay