I am a UX Design Reseacher in the Distributed & Interactive Systems (DIS) Group at Centrum Wiskunde en Informatica (CWI), the Dutch national research institute for computer Science and mathematics in the Netherlands.
Currently, I am part of VOXReality (Horizon-EU Project) where I focus on enhancing user experience and design for XR Applications.
Previously, I did my joint doctoral studies as a Marie-Curie fellow at Center for Advanced Studies, Research and Development in Sardinia, (Italy) with Dr. Gobbetti (Director ViC Group) and was also enrolled in the PhD Program, supervised by Prof. Dr. Riccardo Scateni at the state Università degli Studi di Cagliari(Italy).
My PhD Topic was "Scalable Exploration for Completed Objects and Environments beyong plain visual replication", more details can be found here and thesis PDF can be downloaded from this link.
Areas of Research Interest:
👥 Human-Computer Interaction (HCI),
🌟 User Experience (UX),
eXtended Reality Applications (XR),
🖥️ Computer Graphics (CG)
🏛️ Cultural Heritage (CH).
Designed and co-developed interactive experiences within Horizon Worlds, emphasizing user engagement mechanics, interaction design, and end-to-end user journey optimization.
Received 1:1 mentorship on product lifecycle strategy, pre-production planning, production, release, and monetization approaches.
Engaged with Meta’s ecosystem at Meta Connect, gaining early exposure to device launches and emerging immersive technology trends.
User centric Requirements for Enhancing XR Use Cases with Machine Learning Capabilities. Lee, S.; Ahsan, M.; Viola, I.; and César, P. In IEEE Conference on Virtual Reality and 3D User Interfaces, VR 2025 - Abstracts and Workshops, Saint Malo, France, March 8-12, 2025, pages 753–757, 2025. IEEE
Enhancing the Audience Experience for VR and AR Theatre with AI-generated Subtitles. Viola, I.; Ahsan, M.; Chatzifoti, O.; Yonkov, A.; Oikonomou, E.; Radin, I.; Maka, P.; Issam, A.; and César, P. In Batmaz, A. U.; Machuca, M. D. B.; Ortega, F.; Zielasko, D.; Kim, K.; Skarbez, R.; Plabst, L.; Banic, A.; and Stroppa, M., editor(s), Proceedings of the 2025 31st ACM Symposium on Virtual Reality Software and Technology, VRST 2025, Montreal, QC, Canada, November 12-14, 2025, pages 71:1–71:11, 2025. ACM
VRD: A multi-lingual translation and Ai-Assisted Navigation experience for VR Conference Application. Ahsan, M.; Viola, I.; Toledo, M.; Kontopoulos, D.; and César, P. In Batmaz, A. U.; Machuca, M. D. B.; Ortega, F.; Zielasko, D.; Kim, K.; Skarbez, R.; Plabst, L.; Banic, A.; and Stroppa, M., editor(s), Proceedings of the 2025 31st ACM Symposium on Virtual Reality Software and Technology, VRST 2025, Montreal, QC, Canada, November 12-14, 2025, pages 135:1–135:3, 2025. ACM
LEGO Co-builder: Exploring Fine-Grained Vision-Language Modeling for Multimodal LEGO Assembly Assistants. Huang, H.; Pei, J.; Aliannejadi, M.; Sun, X.; Ahsan, M.; Yu, C.; Ren, Z.; César, P.; and Wang, J. CoRR, abs/2507.05515. 2025.
My quick impressions
The glasses
🌍 Translations & command control: 9.5/10
🎛️ Interface: 7/10 (my impression was that it is currently optimized only for the right side, check website)
📷 Image / video quality: approx. 3K
Neural Band
⚡ Responsiveness: 9.5/10
🤲 Comfort: 8/10
✋ Works smoothly with both hands
🖐️ Gestures UX: 9/10
🎚️ Haptics control: 8.5/10