When Columbia engineer Axl Chen, MS '23, enrolled in "Practical Deep Learning System Performance," he couldn’t have imagined he would soon be leading a start-up that develops full-body VR tracking shoes. But that’s exactly what happened. The course—taught by Professor Parijat Dube—introduced Chen to algorithms that can boost the accuracy of human activity recognition. A year later, he’s the proud founder and CEO of Surplex, a company developing a full-body VR tracker, hidden inside a pair of shoes.
"I [was] really interested in AI applications, but I [hadn’t] found a lot of applications where it is a novel kind of research that can be applied into the real world," says Chen. Now, Surplex is working on one such application: capturing full-body human motion for practical virtual reality uses like gaming and professional sports training.
Bridging the Gap Between Technology and Imagination
Combining dense sensors, IMU, and deep learning, Chen and a team of engineers and developers from Columbia, MIT, UPenn, Rutgers, and China's Tsinghua University have created a pair of shoes that have the potential to revolutionize today's VR experience.
"We are combining textile sensing and AI wisdom for human pose estimation," Chen says.
The Surplex shoes use 480 pressure sensors that track body movements with "great accuracy, even when making tiny motions," according to the project's Kickstarter campaign. "Better still, you don't need to be confined to limited space, or tangled up with cords and straps as with other VR trackers.”
Chen, who has an undergraduate degree from Parsons School of Design, took his first steps at Columbia Engineering in a summer program.
"I actually came to Columbia for an exchange [program], basically a summer semester. Here, I took a class of Machine Learning and also deep learning,” Chen says, “and I was actually quite fascinated by AI technology. Then, I applied for a Masters at Col
