Alex Olwal, Ph.D.

Alex Olwal, Ph.D.

Senior Staff Research Scientist and Manager, Google AR

Interaction Technology R&D · Augmented Reality · Wearables · Ubiquitous Computing · Human—Computer Interaction · Accessibility · Displays and Sensors

Research conducted at Google Research, MIT, Columbia University, University of California, KTH (Royal Institute of Technology), and Microsoft Research, with much appreciated collaborators and contributors at the same or other institutions. Also, thank you Stanford University, Rhode Island School of Design and KTH for the opportunity to teach.

Selected All Publications Google Scholar Open Source

AR Language

Augmented Language was featured in the Google I/O 2022 Keynote. Live translation of speech in everyday glasses has the potential to make language more universally accessible and understandable.

"Let's see what happens when we take our advances in translation and transcription, and deliver them in your line-of-sight in one of the early prototypes that we have been testing." (Sundar Pichai, CEO Google)

Wearable Subtitles: Augmenting Spoken Communication with Lightweight Eyewear for All-day Captioning
Olwal, A., Balke, K., Votintcev, D., Starner, T., Conn, P., Chinh, B., and Corda, B.

Proceedings of UIST 2020 - Best Demo Honorable Mention Award (ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology), Virtual Event, Oct 20-23, 2020, pp. 1108-1120.

UIST 2020 - Best Demo Honorable Mention Award

Quantifying The Effect of Simulator-Based Data Augmentation for Speech Recognition on Augmented Reality Glasses
Arakawa, R., Parvaix, M., Lai, C., Erdogan, H., and Olwal, A.

Proceedings of ICASSP 2024 (IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing), Seoul, South Korea, Apr 14-19, 2024, pp. 726-730.

ICASSP 2024

ChatDirector: Enhancing Video Conferencing with Space-Aware Scene Rendering and Speech-Driven Layout Transition
Qian, X., Tan, F., Zhang, Y., Collins, B., Kim, B., Olwal, A., Ramani, K., and Du, R.

Proceedings of CHI 2024 (SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems), Honolulu, HI, May 11-16, 2024, pp. 1-16.

CHI 2024

Visual Captions: Augmenting Verbal Communication with On-the-fly Visuals
Liu, X, Kirilyuk, V., Yuan, X, Olwal, A., Chi, P., Chen, X., and Du, R.

Proceedings of CHI 2023 (SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems), Hamburg, Germany, Apr 23-28, 2023, pp. 1-20.

CHI 2023

Modeling and Improving Text Stability in Live Captions
Liu, B., Zhang, J., Ferrer, L., Xu, S., Bahirwani, V., Smus, B., Olwal, A., and Du, R.

CHI 2023 Extended Abstracts (SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems), Hamburg, Germany, Apr 23-28, 2023, pp. 1-9.

CHI 2023