Rishav Banerjee

Researcher / Developer

(Sorta) About Me

> alias cat='tac'

I love tinkering with technology, getting it to shape and form to my will. Just the slightest bit crazy about custom editors like Emacs and Neovim (yes, I like both).

Primarily a Unity and Python developer, although I am comfortable with a reasonable number of other languages and frameworks (see Skills)

Experience

HCI Researcher

Jan 2024 - Present · Okanagan Visualization and Interaction Lab

Conducting HCI research on one-handed gestural input for smart glasses, focusing on hand-tracking interaction design, usability, and input translation pipelines for wearable computing.
Designed and implemented virtual reality applications in Unity to capture, reconstruct, and evaluate real-time hand gesture interactions for adaptive interface experimentation.
Built a real-time motion-capture pipeline using Vicon, Python WebSockets, and Unity to stream user hand-pose data into a VR environment on Meta Quest 3 for dynamic, on-hand and around-hand user interfaces.

Robotics Engineer

Feb 2026 - Present · (affiliated with) Honda Research Institute

Engineered AI sensemaking workflows for conversational robots designed for child interaction, supporting context-aware dialogue and multimodal human-robot interaction research.
Implemented a fully local, privacy-preserving speech-to-text pipeline and conversational agent on consumer-grade hardware, improving deployability and removing reliance on cloud services.
Deployed in a private middle school for investing child-robot interactions and conversations with 20+ successful sessions.

Teaching Assistant

Jan 2024 - Dec 2025 · University of British Columbia

Supported instruction for undergraduate and graduate courses including AR/VR Development for Immersive Storytelling, Introduction to Game Development with Unity, and Immersive Technology Design Studio using the VEMS display environment.
Taught and mentored cohorts ranging from 15 graduate students across disciplines to 150 undergraduate students, providing technical guidance in immersive technology, Unity development, and interactive system design.

Education

PhD - Computer Science CGPA: 3.7/4

2024 Jan - (expected) 2027 May · University of British Columbia

B.Tech - Computer Science CGPA: 9.3/10

2019 Jun - 2023 May · SRM Institute of Science and Technology

Publications

ThumbSwype: Thumb-to-Finger Gesture Based Text-Entry for Head Mounted Displays (2025)
Rishav Banerjee, Shariff Faleel, Omang Baheti, Khalad Hasan, Pourang Irani
ACM MobileHCI
What’s the Thumb Doing? Improving Precision for Thumb-to-Finger Interactions on Hand Proximate User Interfaces (2025)
Shariff Faleel, Rishav Banerjee, Omang Baheti, Khalad Hasan, Pourang Irani
Graphics Interface
‘Substitute’ knowledge of results provided through virtual reality enhances motor imagery-based learning (2026)
Celine Balay, Rishav Banerjee, Ghazaleh Shahin, Dingfu Lu, Pourang Irani, Cornelia Frank, Sarah Kraeutner
Psychological Research
Exploring One-Handed Thumb-to-Finger Text Composition Systems for Head Mounted Displays (in-press) (2026)
Rishav Banerjee, Shariff Faleel, Pourang Irani
ACM Designing Interactive Systems

Skills

VR Development: Unity, C#, OpenXR, Meta SDK, MRTK

Research: Quantitative/Qualitative Analysis, Literature Review, Human Studies

Data Analysis: Preprocessing and Visualization (Pandas, Seaborn), Statistical Analysis (R)

Tools: Vim, Emacs, Neovim, Git, Docker, Unix/Posix CLI, Bash/Pwsh, WSL

Soft Skills: Leadership, Team Player, Public Speaking, Project Management

AI: Deep Learning, LLMs, Audio Processing, Computer Vision, Pytorch

Other Programming Languages: C/C++, Go, Lua, ELisp, Clojure, Java, ROS, JS/TS