Wang Silang

My interest in HCI and AI began when I read The Singularity Is Near in my final year of primary school in mainland China. After a two-day hunger strike, and memorizing every English word in six American primary school textbooks in two months, I left China alone to live with my aunt in Singapore. Growing up there, video calls with my parents kept breaking down during a difficult adolescence, and only later did I understand why: at home, they had always offered comfort and resolved disagreements through touch, a hug or a tap on the shoulder, and none of that could travel through a screen. That was my first revelation that today's technologies still struggle to capture, transmit and display the smell, touch, taste and physiological signals on which we build our emotions, identities and memories.

A second revelation came with my first perfume, Jo Malone's Orange Blossom. The first time I smelled it, I felt teleported into a Metaverse orchard, standing before an orange tree, astonished that an artificial fragrance could smell more orange-like than a real orange. Our senses and brain work in intricate ways, and perceptually meaningful experiences can be engineered without their physical sources; what we perceive as real is as scientific a question as it is philosophical. Together, these moments drive two complementary directions in my research: to use emerging technologies to scientifically understand human perception, from smell and taste to touch and physiological states, and to translate that understanding into technologies that could meaningfully approximate and recreate these experiences, enriching how we interact with the world and with one another.