In recent years there have been notable technological VR and AR advancements and an exploding interest in their application. A great potential of VR and AR, and yet one of their main challenges, is to enable users not to be mere observers. Appropriate input and output interfaces can allow direct interaction with the virtual content. Direct touch implies the use of hands and the feeling of haptic feedback. Here I will analyze the importance of leveraging our understanding of perception in creating the conditions for believable hand-based interaction. I will show examples of the potential of using hands in VR and the effect of multisensory feedback for the perception of virtual objects.

Humanoid robotics plays a central role in robotics research as well as in understanding intelligence. Engineering humanoid robots that are able to learn from humans and sensorimotor experience, to predict the consequences of actions and exploit the interaction with the world to extend their cognitive horizon remains a research grand challenge. Currently, we are experiencing AI systems with superhuman performance in games, image and speech processing. However, the generation of robot behaviors with human-like motion intelligence and performance has yet to be achieved. In this talk, I will present recent progress towards engineering 24/7 humanoid robots that link perception and action to generate intelligent behavior. I will show the ARMAR humanoid robots performing complex grasping and manipulation tasks in kitchen and industrial environments, learning actions from human observation and experience as well as reasoning about object-action relations.