Daniel Leithinger

Daniel Leithinger is a Visiting Assistant Professor at the ATLAS Institute and Department of Computer Science at the University of Colorado Boulder, with prior appointments as a Design Tech Innovation Fellow at Cornell University. His research focuses on shape-changing interfaces, haptic technology, and physical computing, creating systems that extend digital information into tangible forms.

• Education: PhD from MIT Media Lab (2015) under Hiroshi Ishii's Tangible Media Group.
• Industry Collaborations: Microsoft Research, Adobe Research, Shell, Olympus, Jansport, and Lexus.

His work explores mixed reality prototyping, responsive environments, and distributed haptic systems, with publications at ACM UIST, CHI, TEI, and SIGGRAPH. Key projects include inFORM (exhibited at Cooper Hewitt Museum), RoomShift (VR with swarm robots), and TactorBots (emotional haptic toolkits).

• Awards: Mass Challenge Accelerator Gold (2015), CHI Best Demo Runner Up (2023), UIST Best Paper Honorable Mention (2020), Red Dot Award (2014).

Leithinger has taught courses on physical telepresence, haptic interfaces, and elastic spaces at CU Boulder, and previously instructed at MIT Media Lab and FH Oberösterreich. His research integrates mechanical engineering, materials science, and design to create novel human-computer interaction paradigms.