Elias Giannopoulos
Universitat de Barcelona, Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya
Papers
3
Total Citations
99
H-Index
3
About
Elias Giannopoulos is a pioneering researcher in human-robot interaction and immersive virtual reality, with a focus on creating realistic, physically embodied social experiences between humans and machines. His work bridges the gap between virtual and physical worlds, exploring how haptic feedback can generate convincing illusions of social touch. In his highly cited 2011 paper "Handshake: Realistic Human-Robot Interaction in Haptic Enhanced Virtual Reality" (42 citations), Giannopoulos developed a system enabling users to shake hands with a virtual partner through multimodal haptic signals, demonstrating that carefully designed robotic feedback can produce a genuine sense of physical connection. His follow-up study comparing real and virtual handshakes (40 citations) further validated these findings, showing that participants responded similarly to both experiences. Perhaps his most imaginative contribution is "Beaming into the Rat World" (17 citations), where he created a teleoperation system allowing humans to interact with rats at the rodent's own scale—a groundbreaking achievement in cross-species embodied interaction. Giannopoulos’s work has been instrumental in advancing telepresence, social robotics, and virtual embodiment, with his research cited over 100 times and influencing fields from rehabilitation to entertainment.
Research Focus
Key Achievements
Top Papers
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