Welcome to the Haptics and Virtual Reality Laboratory (HVR Lab) at POSTECH (Pohang University of Science and Technology) in Korea.

Haptics is an emerging interdisciplinary research area that aims at:
- Understanding the sensorymotor characteristics of our body, and
- Developing a computer-controlled system that allows the user to physically interact with virtual or remote environments through the sense of touch.

We carry out research on the fundamentals of haptics in all aspects and develop applications in virtual reality, human-computer interaction, robotics, and so on.

The POSTECH HVR Lab has quite a history. Initially, our lab was founded in 1991 with the name of Virtual Reality Laboratory by Prof. Chan-Mo Park. Back then, we focused on research issues of computer graphics and animation in VR. In 1996, Prof. Gerard Jounghyun Kim joined the force. The research scope of Prof. Kim covers many intriguing topics in VR, including presence, 3D multimodal interaction, new and structured approaches to mixed reality content authoring, and more recently, hand-held VR. Our lab was renamed to Virtual Reality and Perceptive Media Laboratory. The tremendous passion and efforts of Profs. Park and Kim have raised our lab to its current status. In 2005, Prof. Park retired, and Prof. Seungmoon Choi joined our lab. His research areas are haptics, its applications to VR and robotics, and applied perception. In summer 2006, we had to let Prof. Kim move to Korea University due to his personal reasons. In spring 2007, we renamed our laboratory again to Haptics and Virtual Reality Laboratory, combining the new research thrust and the tradition of our lab. At present, Prof. Choi is the director of the HVR lab.

Due to the interdisciplinary nature of haptics and VR, we collaborate closely with other laboratories. At POSTECH, they include the Computer Graphics Laboratory (Prof. Seungyong Lee), the User Interface Laboratory (Prof. Sung Ho Han), the Robotics and Automation Laboratory (Prof. Jin Soo Lee), and Robotics & Biomechanics Laboratory (Prof. Wankyun Chung). Internationally, we closely work together with the Haptic Interface Research Laboratory (Prof. Hong Z. Tan) at Purdue University, USA.

We invite you to explore this web page and learn about our research activities, and would like to hear what you think.

Prof. Seungmoon Choi
Department of Computer Science and Engineering
POSTECH

The scientific disciplines we research in our lab are interdisciplinary, and thus students are working on diverse research issues on virtual reality, haptics, perception, and robotics. To be able to that, students need to be learn wide background knowledge, for example, computer graphics, haptics, psychophysics, perception, robotics, system theory, statistics, and electronic hardware. We therefore prefer students who are not afraid of learning unfamiliar concepts and knowledge and willing to apply them to real applications. If you are one of them, we encourage you to consider haptics and VR for your graduate study.