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Mark Billinghurst

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Mark Billinghurst is a New Zealand computer scientist and professor of human-computer interaction whose research covers augmented reality (AR), virtual reality (VR) and remote collaboration. With Hirokazu Kato he created ARToolKit, the open-source marker tracking library first shown at SIGGRAPH 1999, and during his PhD at the University of Washington he built the MagicBook, a book-based interface that lets readers move from the printed page into AR and then into immersive VR.[1][2]

He returned to New Zealand in 2002 to found the Human Interface Technology Laboratory New Zealand (HIT Lab NZ) at the University of Canterbury, which he ran for 13 years. In 2015 he moved to the University of South Australia, where he has directed the Empathic Computing Laboratory, and in 2018 he also joined the Auckland Bioengineering Institute at the University of Auckland.[3][4] As of March 2026 his Adelaide University staff page lists him as Director of the Australian Research Centre for Interactive and Virtual Environments (IVE).[5]

His honours include the IEEE VGTC Virtual Reality Technical Achievement Award (2013), the VGTC Virtual Reality Career Award (2019), the ISMAR Career Impact Award (2019), induction into the ACM SIGCHI Academy (2022) and elevation to IEEE Fellow for the 2023 class "for contributions to augmented and virtual reality".[1][3][6][7][8]

Reviewed 11 October 2026. Checked the education, career dates, positions, ARToolKit and MagicBook details, awards table and current Adelaide University role against the IEEE VGTC 2013 citation PDF, IEEE VR 2019 and 2024 award pages, ISMAR past-symposium record, IEEE Computer Society releases, University of Auckland 2018 and 2022 news, Adelaide University staff and IVE pages, Empathic Computing Lab bio, Mathematics Genealogy entry, the MagicBook, IWAR '99 and ISAR 2000 paper texts, and Crossref metadata for every listed paper. About review dates.

Early life and education

Billinghurst studied at the University of Waikato in New Zealand, completing a Bachelor of Computing and Mathematical Science with first-class honours in 1990 and a Master of Philosophy in applied mathematics and physics in 1992.[9] He then went to the Human Interface Technology Laboratory (HIT Lab) at the University of Washington in Seattle, where he worked as a research associate and earned a PhD in electrical engineering in 2002 under Thomas Furness and Linda Shapiro.[9][3] His dissertation was titled Shared Space: Explorations in Collaborative Augmented Reality.[10]

Career

HIT Lab, University of Washington

At the HIT Lab, Billinghurst worked on both VR interaction and collaborative AR. He was a co-author, with Ivan Poupyrev, Suzanne Weghorst and Tadao Ichikawa, of the 1996 UIST paper that introduced the go-go interaction technique, a non-linear mapping for direct manipulation of objects in VR and an early 3D user interface technique.[11] With Weghorst and Furness he described the "Shared Space" approach to computer supported collaborative work in the journal Virtual Reality in 1998.[12] The IEEE VGTC citation for his 2013 award credits his PhD work with one of the first AR systems for face-to-face collaboration, the first AR teleconferencing system, and the first formal user studies of how the technology affects communication.[1]

ARToolKit grew out of this work. The HIT Lab's history of the toolkit dates it to 1999, when Kato arrived at the lab, says it was first demonstrated at SIGGRAPH 1999 for the Shared Space project, and names Kato and Billinghurst as its original creators.[2] The two described its marker tracking and head-mounted display calibration methods in a paper for the 2nd IEEE and ACM International Workshop on Augmented Reality (IWAR '99), built around an AR conferencing system in which remote collaborators appeared as live video on virtual monitors.[13] According to the VGTC citation, ARToolKit was released as open source in 2000 and had since become the most widely used open-source AR development tool; the citation credits Billinghurst's documentation, tutorials, workshops and promotion of the toolkit with advancing the field in the early 2000s.[1] The University of Auckland describes it as the first open-source AR library.[4] A 2000 paper by Kato, Billinghurst, Poupyrev, K. Imamoto and K. Tachibana described an accurate vision-based tracking method for tabletop AR that kept working when users covered some of the markers, with tangible interaction techniques demonstrated in a prototype virtual interior design application where users moved virtual objects with a real paddle. The VGTC citation lists the "Tangible AR" interaction metaphor among his contributions.[14][1]

MagicBook

The MagicBook, built by Billinghurst, Kato and Poupyrev, used an ordinary illustrated book as the interface. Read without technology it was a normal book; seen through a handheld AR display, animated 3D models rose out of its pages; and with a flick of a switch on the display's handle the reader could fly into the scene as an immersive virtual environment, so that one interface spanned Paul Milgram's reality-virtuality continuum.[15] The handheld display combined a Sony Glasstron PLM-A35 with two 266 x 225 pixel LCD panels, a small color camera, an InterSense InterTrax inertial tracker, and a switch and pressure pad in the handle. Head tracking in AR mode used ARToolKit on black-bordered pictures in the book, at 30 frames per second on an 800 MHz Pentium III computer; in VR mode the system switched to the inertial tracker, and pressing harder on the pad made the user fly faster.[15] Several readers could share a book: those still in AR saw an immersed user as a miniature avatar in the scene, while the immersed user saw them as large virtual heads looking down from the sky.[15] The authors reported building nearly a dozen books for architecture, scientific visualization, education and entertainment.[15] The MagicBook won the 2001 Discover Award in the entertainment category.[1][3] Billinghurst and Kato also summarized their work in "Collaborative augmented reality" in Communications of the ACM in July 2002.[16]

In 2001 Billinghurst co-founded ARToolworks, which the VGTC citation called in 2013 one of the oldest AR companies still active.[1] The company was later sold to DAQRI.[4]

HIT Lab NZ, University of Canterbury (2002-2015)

Billinghurst moved back to New Zealand in 2002 and founded HIT Lab NZ at the University of Canterbury in Christchurch, which he directed for 13 years.[1][3] In 2002 he was also the founder and chief executive of HIT Lab NZ Ltd, which became the AR marketing company Motim.[1] The lab's software outputs included the osgART AR library, the BuildAR authoring tool and Outdoor AR software, and its research covered multimodal, transitional and lens-based AR interfaces.[1] The University of Auckland said in 2018 that nine companies had spun out of HIT Lab NZ, among them Quiver, which made the first AR colouring book.[4]

The lab was an early group in mobile AR. In 2005 Anders Henrysson, Billinghurst and Mark Ollila presented a face-to-face collaborative AR application on mobile phones at ISMAR, which the VGTC citation describes as the first of its kind.[17][1] The same team showed AR Tennis in the SIGGRAPH 2006 Emerging Technologies program, and the game won the International Mobile Gaming Awards Grand Prix in 2006.[18][3] In 2007 the lab produced what the VGTC citation calls the world's first mobile AR advertising campaign; a mobile AR campaign for Wellington Zoo won an Adweek Buzz Award that year.[1][3]

Outside the lab, Billinghurst was appointed to the New Zealand Government's Growth and Innovation Advisory Board in 2005.[9] He was general chair of the International Symposium on Mixed and Augmented Reality (ISMAR) in 2004 in Arlington, Virginia (with Yohan Baillot) and in 2013 in Adelaide (with Bruce Thomas), and gave the ISMAR 2007 dinner keynote in Nara, "Where's the Reality in Augmented Reality?".[6] By 2013 he had served on more than 20 program committees, including IEEE VR, UIST, CHI and SIGGRAPH, and was an associate editor of Computers & Graphics.[1] He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of New Zealand in 2013; the election was announced at the society's Academy annual general meeting in Wellington on 20 November 2013, when he was still director of HIT Lab NZ.[19][20]

South Australia, Auckland and empathic computing (2015-present)

Billinghurst joined the University of South Australia in Adelaide in 2015 and has directed its Empathic Computing Laboratory since then; by 2019 he was the university's Professor of Human Computer Interaction.[3][4] In February 2018 the University of Auckland announced that he would join the Auckland Bioengineering Institute (ABI) as the second appointee of its Entrepreneurial Universities programme, leading a team to research telepresence systems that combine AR with physiological sensing; the IEEE VR 2019 biography describes this as a part-time role. The Empathic Computing Laboratory has since operated across both universities.[4][3][7]

The lab's research goal is systems that help people understand one another and share what they see, hear and feel during remote collaboration.[7][21] An early example is the Empathy Glasses (CHI 2016 extended abstracts, with Katsutoshi Masai, Kai Kunze and Maki Sugimoto), an AR headset that relays the wearer's gaze, facial expression and heart rate to a remote collaborator.[21][22][7] In Mini-Me (CHI 2018), a local AR user and a remote VR user collaborated while the VR user appeared as an adaptive avatar that showed their gaze direction and body gestures and changed size and orientation to stay in the AR user's field of view; in the authors' user study it significantly improved social presence.[23] The University of Auckland reported in 2022 that the group was also measuring how brain activity synchronizes between collaborators, sharing gaze and gestures in AR and VR, and using 360-degree video for shared virtual tours of real places.[7]

Billinghurst is editor-in-chief of the journal Empathic Computing, published by Science Exploration Press, whose inaugural issue of five papers appeared in 2025. His opening editorial describes the field as the overlap of three trends (experience capture, natural collaboration and implicit understanding) and names the Empathy Glasses as an early prototype of an empathic computing interface.[21]

The University of South Australia and the University of Adelaide agreed to merge into Adelaide University, which was due to be fully operational in 2026.[24] Adelaide University's IVE centre, founded in 2019 from existing research groups, lists Billinghurst as its director and as a leader of its Empathic Computing group with Associate Professor Gun Lee.[25][5]

Industry and venture work

His Adelaide researcher profile lists earlier work at British Telecom, Nokia, Google and the MIT Media Laboratory, and the IEEE VR 2019 biography described him as an Amazon Scholar at that time.[20][3] In February 2016 he became one of four partners, with Ori Inbar, Matt Miesnieks and Tom Emrich, in Super Ventures, which launched as an incubator and fund dedicated to AR with an inaugural fund of $10 million, according to the launch announcement.[26] The University of Auckland's 2018 announcement also named him as chief executive of Envisage AR Ltd.[4]

Awards and honours

Year Honour Notes
2001 Discover Award, entertainment category For the MagicBook[1]
2006 World Class New Zealand Award (ICT category) [3]
2006 International Mobile Gaming Awards Grand Prix For AR Tennis[3]
2007 Adweek Buzz Award, Best Print Campaign For the Wellington Zoo mobile AR campaign[3]
2009 ISMAR Best Student Paper Award (co-author) "Shape recognition and pose estimation for mobile augmented reality", with Nate Hagbi, Oriel Bergig and Jihad El-Sana[6]
2012 ISMAR 10 Years Lasting Impact Award Shared with Hirokazu Kato for their IWAR '99 marker tracking paper[6]
2013 IEEE VGTC Virtual Reality Technical Achievement Award For technical developments that advanced AR research and commercialization[1]
2013 Fellow of the Royal Society of New Zealand [19][20]
2018 Research Excellence Award, Division of ITEE, University of South Australia [3]
2019 IEEE VGTC Virtual Reality Career Award [3]
2019 ISMAR Career Impact Award ISMAR 2019, Beijing[6]
2022 ACM SIGCHI Academy Second New Zealander inducted, according to the University of Auckland[7]
2022 IEEE Virtual Reality Academy (inaugural class) One of 49 inductees[27]
2023 IEEE Fellow "For contributions to augmented and virtual reality"[8]
2023 Best IEEE ISMAR 2023 Demo Award (co-recipient) "Hybrid Cross Reality Collaborative System"[6]
2024 IEEE VGTC Virtual Reality Service Award For service to VGTC VR conferences and the AR/VR academic community[28]
2024 AWE XR Hall of Fame (inaugural) One of 101 people honoured by Augmented World Expo[29][30]

Selected publications

Year Title Co-authors Venue
1996 "The go-go interaction technique: non-linear mapping for direct manipulation in VR" Ivan Poupyrev, Suzanne Weghorst, Tadao Ichikawa UIST '96[11]
1998 "Shared space: An augmented reality approach for computer supported collaborative work" Suzanne Weghorst, Thomas Furness Virtual Reality, vol. 3, no. 1[12]
1999 "Marker tracking and HMD calibration for a video-based augmented reality conferencing system" Hirokazu Kato IWAR '99[13]
2001 "The MagicBook: a transitional AR interface" Hirokazu Kato, Ivan Poupyrev Computers & Graphics, vol. 25, no. 5[31]
2002 "Collaborative augmented reality" Hirokazu Kato Communications of the ACM, vol. 45, no. 7[16]
2005 "Face to face collaborative AR on mobile phones" Anders Henrysson, Mark Ollila ISMAR '05[17]
2015 "A Survey of Augmented Reality" Adrian Clark, Gun Lee Foundations and Trends in Human-Computer Interaction, vol. 8, no. 2-3[32]
2018 "Mini-Me: An Adaptive Avatar for Mixed Reality Remote Collaboration" Thammathip Piumsomboon and others CHI 2018[23]
2021 "Grand Challenges for Augmented Reality" none Frontiers in Virtual Reality, vol. 2[33]

References

  1. ↑ 1.00 1.01 1.02 1.03 1.04 1.05 1.06 1.07 1.08 1.09 1.10 1.11 1.12 1.13 1.14 "The 2013 Virtual Reality Technical Achievement Award: Mark Billinghurst". IEEE Visualization and Graphics Technical Committee. IEEE Computer Society. 2013. https://ieeecs-media.computer.org/tc-media/sites/49/2019/10/30175012/vr_tech13.pdf. Retrieved 2026-10-11.
  2. ↑ 2.0 2.1 "ARToolKit Documentation (History)". Human Interface Technology Laboratory, University of Washington. https://www.hitl.washington.edu/artoolkit/documentation/history.htm. Retrieved 2026-10-11.
  3. ↑ 3.00 3.01 3.02 3.03 3.04 3.05 3.06 3.07 3.08 3.09 3.10 3.11 3.12 3.13 3.14 "2019 VGTC Awards". IEEE VR 2019. IEEE Visualization and Graphics Technical Community. 2019. https://ieeevr.org/2019/awards/vgtc.html. Retrieved 2026-10-11.
  4. ↑ 4.0 4.1 4.2 4.3 4.4 4.5 4.6 "World leader in Augmented Reality joins University". University of Auckland. 2018-02-20. https://www.auckland.ac.nz/en/news/2018/02/20/world-leader-in-augmented-reality-joins-university.html. Retrieved 2026-10-11.
  5. ↑ 5.0 5.1 "Prof Mark Billinghurst". Adelaide University. 2026-03-06. https://adelaide.edu.au/people/Mark.Billinghurst. Retrieved 2026-10-11.
  6. ↑ 6.0 6.1 6.2 6.3 6.4 6.5 "ISMAR - Past Symposiums". IEEE International Symposium on Mixed and Augmented Reality. https://www.ismar.net/past_symposiums/. Retrieved 2026-10-11.
  7. ↑ 7.0 7.1 7.2 7.3 7.4 7.5 "Real world recognition for research in augmented reality". University of Auckland. 2022-04-06. https://www.auckland.ac.nz/en/news/2022/04/06/recognition-for-research-on-augmented-reality.html. Retrieved 2026-10-11.
  8. ↑ 8.0 8.1 "IEEE Computer Society Announces 2023 Class of Fellows". IEEE Computer Society. 2022-12-09. https://www.computer.org/press-room/2022-news/ieee-computer-society-announces-2023-class-of-fellows. Retrieved 2026-10-11.
  9. ↑ 9.0 9.1 9.2 "Mark Billinghurst". Empathic Computing Lab. https://empathiccomputing.org/team/mark-billinghurst/. Retrieved 2026-10-11.
  10. ↑ "Mark Nathan Billinghurst". Mathematics Genealogy Project. North Dakota State University. https://mathgenealogy.org/id.php?id=78057. Retrieved 2026-10-11.
  11. ↑ 11.0 11.1 Ivan Poupyrev, Mark Billinghurst, Suzanne Weghorst, Tadao Ichikawa (1996). "The go-go interaction technique: non-linear mapping for direct manipulation in VR". Proceedings of the 9th Annual ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology (UIST '96), pp. 79-80. ACM. https://doi.org/10.1145/237091.237102. Retrieved 2026-10-11.
  12. ↑ 12.0 12.1 Mark Billinghurst, Suzanne Weghorst, Thomas Furness (1998-03). "Shared space: An augmented reality approach for computer supported collaborative work". Virtual Reality, vol. 3, no. 1, pp. 25-36. Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01409795. Retrieved 2026-10-11.
  13. ↑ 13.0 13.1 Hirokazu Kato, Mark Billinghurst (1999). "Marker tracking and HMD calibration for a video-based augmented reality conferencing system". Proceedings 2nd IEEE and ACM International Workshop on Augmented Reality (IWAR '99), pp. 85-94. IEEE. https://doi.org/10.1109/IWAR.1999.803809. Retrieved 2026-10-11.
  14. ↑ H. Kato, M. Billinghurst, I. Poupyrev, K. Imamoto, K. Tachibana (2000). "Virtual object manipulation on a table-top AR environment". Proceedings IEEE and ACM International Symposium on Augmented Reality (ISAR 2000), pp. 111-119. IEEE. https://doi.org/10.1109/ISAR.2000.880934. Retrieved 2026-10-11.
  15. ↑ 15.0 15.1 15.2 15.3 Mark Billinghurst, Hirokazu Kato, Ivan Poupyrev (2001). "The MagicBook: Moving Seamlessly between Reality and Virtuality". IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications, Projects in VR, May/June 2001. IEEE. https://www.hitl.washington.edu/artoolkit/Papers/cgaMay2001.pdf. Retrieved 2026-10-11.
  16. ↑ 16.0 16.1 Mark Billinghurst, Hirokazu Kato (2002-07). "Collaborative augmented reality". Communications of the ACM, vol. 45, no. 7, pp. 64-70. ACM. https://doi.org/10.1145/514236.514265. Retrieved 2026-10-11.
  17. ↑ 17.0 17.1 Anders Henrysson, Mark Billinghurst, Mark Ollila (2005). "Face to face collaborative AR on mobile phones". Fourth IEEE and ACM International Symposium on Mixed and Augmented Reality (ISMAR '05), pp. 80-89. IEEE. https://doi.org/10.1109/ISMAR.2005.32. Retrieved 2026-10-11.
  18. ↑ Anders Henrysson, Mark Billinghurst, Mark Ollila (2006). "AR tennis". ACM SIGGRAPH 2006 Emerging Technologies. ACM. https://doi.org/10.1145/1179133.1179135. Retrieved 2026-10-11.
  19. ↑ 19.0 19.1 "Latter-day Saint Named a Fellow in the Royal Society of New Zealand". Church Newsroom (Pacific). The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. 2013-12-02. https://news-pacific.churchofjesuschrist.org/article/latter-day-saint-named-a-fellow-in-the-royal-society-of-new-zealand. Retrieved 2026-10-11.
  20. ↑ 20.0 20.1 20.2 "Mark Billinghurst". Adelaide University Researcher Profiles. https://researchers.adelaide.edu.au/profile/mark.billinghurst. Retrieved 2026-10-11.
  21. ↑ 21.0 21.1 21.2 Mark Billinghurst (2025-03-31). "Empathic Computing: a new journal for a new field of computing". Empathic Computing. Science Exploration Press. https://www.sciexplor.com/ec/articles/ec.2025.0006. Retrieved 2026-10-11.
  22. ↑ Katsutoshi Masai, Kai Kunze, Maki Sugimoto, Mark Billinghurst (2016-05-07). "Empathy Glasses". Proceedings of the 2016 CHI Conference Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems, pp. 1257-1263. ACM. https://doi.org/10.1145/2851581.2892370. Retrieved 2026-10-11.
  23. ↑ 23.0 23.1 Thammathip Piumsomboon, Gun A. Lee, Jonathon D. Hart, Barrett Ens, Robert W. Lindeman, Bruce H. Thomas, Mark Billinghurst (2018-04-19). "Mini-Me: An Adaptive Avatar for Mixed Reality Remote Collaboration". Proceedings of the 2018 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, pp. 1-13. ACM. https://doi.org/10.1145/3173574.3173620. Retrieved 2026-10-11.
  24. ↑ Sophie Hogan (2024-07-18). "South Australia and Uni of Adelaide merge in "milestone" launch". The PIE News. https://thepienews.com/adelaide-university-launch/. Retrieved 2026-10-11.
  25. ↑ "Australian Research Centre for Interactive and Virtual Environments". Adelaide University. https://adelaide.edu.au/research/australian-research-centre-for-interactive-and-virtual-environments/. Retrieved 2026-10-11.
  26. ↑ Ori Inbar (2016-02-19). "Super Ventures launches first fund and incubator dedicated to augmented reality". Games Alfresco. https://gamesalfresco.com/2016/02/19/super-ventures-launches-first-fund-and-incubator-dedicated-to-augmented-reality/. Retrieved 2026-10-11.
  27. ↑ "IEEE Virtual Reality Academy Celebrates Inaugural Class of 2022 Inductees". IEEE Computer Society. 2022-05-05. https://www.computer.org/press-room/2022-news/ieee-virtual-reality-academy-2022-inductees. Retrieved 2026-10-11.
  28. ↑ "VGTC Virtual Reality Awards - IEEE VR 2024". IEEE VR 2024. IEEE Visualization and Graphics Technical Community. 2024. https://ieeevr.org/2024/awards/vgtc-awards. Retrieved 2026-10-11.
  29. ↑ "ABI Professor Inducted Into the Inaugural Augmented World Expo XR Hall of Fame". Te Titoki Mataora. 2024-05-31. https://www.tetitokimataora.org.nz/post/abi-professor-inducted-into-the-inaugural-augmented-world-expo-xr-hall-of-fame. Retrieved 2026-10-11.
  30. ↑ "Hall of Fame honour for UniSA augmented reality researchers". The National Tribune (University of South Australia media release). 2024-05-06. https://www.nationaltribune.com.au/hall-of-fame-honour-for-unisa-augmented-reality-researchers/. Retrieved 2026-10-11.
  31. ↑ Mark Billinghurst, Hirokazu Kato, Ivan Poupyrev (2001-10). "The MagicBook: a transitional AR interface". Computers & Graphics, vol. 25, no. 5, pp. 745-753. Elsevier. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0097-8493(01)00117-0. Retrieved 2026-10-11.
  32. ↑ Mark Billinghurst, Adrian Clark, Gun Lee (2015-03-31). "A Survey of Augmented Reality". Foundations and Trends in Human-Computer Interaction, vol. 8, no. 2-3, pp. 73-272. Now Publishers. https://doi.org/10.1561/1100000049. Retrieved 2026-10-11.
  33. ↑ Mark Billinghurst (2021-03-05). "Grand Challenges for Augmented Reality". Frontiers in Virtual Reality, vol. 2. Frontiers Media. https://doi.org/10.3389/frvir.2021.578080. Retrieved 2026-10-11.
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