Meet Vivian Shen, The New ETC Faculty Member Changing the Way Technology Feels

In high school, future Carnegie Mellon University Entertainment Technology Center (ETC) faculty member Vivian Shen didn’t care that much about robotics; she only joined her high school robotics team because a friend did. A fateful trip to the movies changed her mind. 

During her senior year, Shen went to see “Big Hero Six” — a film about a young robotics student who saves the world alongside Baymax, the helpful robot he designed. “It inspired me to a degree a lot of movies don’t,” Shen said. “That movie showed me what technology should be. It should be helping people; it should be individual, personal, and lovable.”

Now, almost a decade later, Shen is completing her PhD at CMU’s Robotics Institute — the department whose research inspired Baymax — and starting a new job as an Assistant Professor at the ETC.

Shen’s PhD research focused on haptic technology: hardware systems designed to simulate touch. “Touch is by far our most important sense. It’s our most sensitive sense, our whole body experiences it, and we experience it every second of the day,” Shen said. “That’s just not true of vision or hearing.”

“A big reason why I even like haptic technology is because I just love watching people use it and their reactions to it,” Shen said. “It’s a very visceral reaction when people put on a haptic device and they try something, like, ‘Whoa!’ I love that feeling.”

Shen’s most recent project — a haptic exosuit — is a perfect example of that. The exosuit is a wearable vest outfitted with strings that attach to the hands, feet, and head, strings that are pulled by motors to simulate the feeling of forces moving against your body.

“For example, you can hold something and feel the weight of it pulling down on your hand,” Shen explained. “You can walk under a waterfall and feel a bunch of forces pulling down on you, as if water’s really hitting you.”

Even though Shen’s Ph.D. research was all about designing and building new kinds of haptic devices, she rarely got to think about how they could be applied. “We didn’t care as much about the end use cases,” she said. “I made gamified applications so people could try it, but it really wasn’t about that. It was about inventing a new actuation method or platform, and making it open source so others could use it.”

That’s precisely why working at the ETC appealed to Shen — it offered her the opportunity to take those prototypes further.

“Researchers typically reach a prototype, publish, and move on. But at the ETC, they’re building full, playable, experienceable things,” she said. “I’m excited to be a part of that process.”

This semester, Shen is serving as a faculty advisor on Tacit, a student project that explores the relationship between physical sensation and emotional response. It’s an area she thinks is ripe for exploration; in fact, she was going to serve as a subject matter expert for the team before she even accepted the ETC’s offer. “They’re trying to connect that emotional question with haptics,” she said. “There’s some cool ideas around that.”

Beyond this semester, Shen is already planning for the future. She will begin teaching courses in the spring, with potential offerings in applied AI and physical computing. Both areas, she says, reflect her core interests in building interactive systems.

When it comes to physical computing, Shen wants to bring more mechanical engineering to the ETC. “Building hardware is my bread and butter,” she said. “I’d love to bring more of that here.”

To support that goal, Shen is setting up a fabrication lab on site at the ETC, one that will include tools for electrical and mechanical prototyping. “It’ll be a space with a bunch of resources for students to use,” she said.

“With applied AI, I’m thinking about ways to use computer vision so people can create animatronics or games that recognize emotion and respond to it — and even recognize people and build a personal relationship with them,” Shen said.

Her perspective on artificial intelligence is shaped by her own understanding of the technology involved as well as the ethics. “AI is a very controversial topic right now, and for good reason,” Shen said. “I think of AI ultimately as a tool. It shouldn’t be used to replace people, it should be used to help them.”

That empathetic, human-centered ethos is exactly what inspired her passion for robotics in the first place. It’s also the ETC’s ethos, reflecting the center’s broader mission of combining engineering, storytelling, and creativity in ways that resonate.

“I think that’s what makes the ETC so exciting,” Shen said. “There’s a lot of creative and technical people here building immersive, emotional experiences. And I’m really happy to be a part of that.”

Feature image: Vivian Shen tests a prototype in her Future Interfaces Group lab