Niall L. Williams

Niall L. Williams is a Faculty Fellow & Postdoc at New York University Tandon School of Engineering, Department of Computer Science and Engineering, and a member of the Immersive Computing Lab led by Prof. Qi Sun. He earned his PhD in Computer Science from the University of Maryland, College Park where he belonged to the GAMMA lab and was advised by Profs. Dinesh Manocha, Aniket Bera, and Ming C. Lin. His dissertation introduced computational methods for natural walking in virtual reality, integrating visual perception, motion planning, computational geometry, and statistical modeling.

Education:

• PhD in Computer Science, University of Maryland, College Park (2024)
• B.S. with High Honors in Computer Science, Davidson College (2019)

Research Interests: Williams’ work sits at the intersection of applied human perception, computer graphics, and virtual/augmented reality. He develops rigorous algorithms that steer users through unseen physical spaces while they experience expansive virtual worlds, studies perceptual thresholds for display artifacts, and designs robotic haptic proxies that provide context-aware force feedback in mixed reality.

Publications Trend: Across 15 recent papers he repeatedly targets redirected walking and locomotion perception (6 papers), near-eye display artifacts and gaze/optic-flow perception (3 papers), haptics & robotics for VR (2 papers), plus influential open-source tools (PettingZoo). Best-paper honors at IEEE VR and ISMAR underscore the community impact of his algorithms.

Scientific Awards & Honors:

• IEEE VR 2022 Best Paper Honorable Mention
• IEEE ISMAR 2021 Best Paper Honorable Mention
• IEEE VR 2021 Best Paper Honorable Mention

Teaching & Service: At NYU he has already served as Instructor for Introduction to Programming and Problem Solving (Spring 2025) and Information Visualization (Fall 2024). Previously he was Head TA for Advances in XR at UMD and a long-time TA for game-programming and data-structures courses. He reviews regularly for IEEE TVCG, IEEE VR, ISMAR, CHI, and sits on the SIGGRAPH Research Career Development Committee.

Labs & Teams: Williams is affiliated with the Immersive Computing Lab at NYU Tandon and previously the GAMMA Lab (UMD) and DRIVE Lab (Davidson College).