Wei Wu

Wei Wu is a PhD student in Interdisciplinary Design and Media at Northeastern University’s College of Arts, Media and Design. Her research sits at the intersection of human-computer interaction, extended reality, embodied interaction, interactive narrative, and playful systems. She is particularly interested in how emerging technologies—such as eye tracking, wearable AR/VR, biosensing, and AI agents—reshape perception, movement, attention, and human experience.

Wei holds an M.A. in Individualized Study from New York University Gallatin School of Individualized Study, where her thesis, There Must Be a Lot of Cyber Fish in That Data Lake: Toward XR Ecological Theater, explored XR, ecology, performance, and human-computer interaction. She was also part of NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program community, where she developed her practice in creative technology, interaction design, and experimental media. She holds a B.A. in Chinese Language and Literature from Southeast University and studied as an exchange student at Beijing Film Academy and Tunghai University.

Her work has been published or presented at venues including CHI, CHI PLAY, C&C, TEI, UIST workshops, and XR Access. Her recent projects examine embodied interaction grammars for AR glasses, gaze-informed VR agents, ecological theater, accessibility-oriented XR systems, and AI-supported embodied learning. She has received recognition including XR Access Best Demo and NYC Media Lab/CHANEL Best Journey, and has served as an NYU ITP Research Resident, NYU Gallatin WetLab Resident Researcher, NYC Media Lab resident artist, and Billion Oyster Project ambassador.

Before entering HCI research, Wei worked for over ten years as an award-winning screenwriter and creative producer in China, receiving the Xia Yan Cup for Outstanding Screenplay, a national-level honor in Chinese screenwriting. This background continues to shape her research approach, which combines design research, ethnography, storytelling, and technical prototyping to investigate how interactive systems can expand bodily, ecological, and cultural ways of knowing.