Mark Hancock

Mark Hancock is an assistant professor at the University of Waterloo in the Department of Management Sciences and associate director of research training for the Games Institute. Before starting at the University of Waterloo, he completed his PhD in computer science at the University of Calgary and his MSc in computer science at the University of British Columbia. Beyond his formal education, he has conducted research in designing interaction for multi-touch surfaces and other collaborative devices in industry at Mitsubishi Electric Research Labs and Intel Corporation, and in academia at Queen’s University and Simon Fraser University.

His research goal is to design, develop and evaluate technology that can support new ways of interacting with computers and information. A central part of this goal is his interest in providing the ability for richer and faster interaction through the use of one’s body, hands, and fingers.The demand for effective interaction is increasing in response to the recent surge in commercial and research hardware that supports the sensing of more and more information about human movement in and around the surfaces ubiquitous in our everyday environment. While this technology has made it possible to interact in interesting and new ways, and even to carry this technology with us everywhere that we go, we have only begun to scratch the surface of what is possible and tend to rely on simple interaction, such as buttons and menus to interact with these new devices. In his research, Hancock considers the fundamental nature of human movement and perception to help inform the design of interaction for new media.