About

Extending digital communication into the human body.

ViiVAI Labs and Studio began with a clear conviction: touch should be part of the digital stack. As digital information grows faster than our ability to absorb it, relying only on screens and speakers creates a bottleneck. We are asking eyes and ears to do too much while leaving the body, our largest sensory organ, mostly unused.

ViiVAI exists to change that. By digitizing touch, we create a more natural sensory channel for immersion, efficiency, and wellness, enabling people to feel information rather than merely see or hear it.

Founder

Ali Israr

Portrait of Ali Israr

Ali Israr is a haptics technology leader, inventor, engineer, and researcher with more than two decades of experience advancing interactive touch systems. Public profiles and speaker biographies describe his work across industry-leading haptics programs at Meta / Facebook Reality Labs, Disney Research, and ByteDance, where he helped lead research and product innovation in tactile interfaces and sensory technologies.

His research spans spatial haptics, affective and social touch, cross-modal perception, wearable feedback systems, and multimodal interaction design. Public scholarly listings and event biographies also note more than 100 scientific publications and over 30 granted patents, reflecting sustained contributions to both foundational research and applied product development.

Ali holds a Ph.D. degree in Mechanical Engineering from Purdue University. His contributions have been widely recognized through Best Paper and Best Demo Awards and featured by major media outlets such as CNN, MIT Technology Review, Wired, BBC, NBC, Variety, and The Washington Post.

Research Themes

Selected areas of expertise

Spatial haptic perception

Perception-driven algorithms for apparent motion, directional cues, body mapping, and high-resolution tactile rendering.

Affective touch

Research into how touch communicates emotion, intent, and social meaning in mediated human interaction.

Wearable haptics

Compact wearable systems that integrate sensors, soft actuators, and efficient control for real-world deployment.

Multimodal interfaces

Systems that fuse motion, audio, visual context, and user behavior to produce more expressive and intelligent feedback.

Media Highlights

Selected press coverage across haptics, AR, and tactile interfaces

Coverage of Ali Israr's work across major media outlets spanning research, product innovation, immersive media, and tactile computing.

Scroll sideways to browse the full press reel.

Discover Magazine

“The Future of Tactile Touch Screens”

“Disney’s ‘Magic Bench’ Fixes AR’s Biggest Blind Spot”

“Disney develops way to 'feel' touchscreen images”

MIT Technology Review

“Getting e-mail on your skin is actually a thing now, thanks to Facebook”

“Disney Researchers Create Mixed-Reality ‘Magic Bench’ for Shared Experiences”

“Vybe Gaming Pad Moves You”

“Vybe gaming pad packs Disney Research's Surround Haptics into a $99 accessory”

“New software plug-in enables users to add haptic effects to games, media”

“Avatar: Flight of Passage: A cinematic, multi-sensory 3D experience that soars”

Washington Post

“Disney invents touchscreen that lets you feel textures”

“Disney Research Develops Tactile 3D Touchscreen”

“Disney’s Amazing Air Cannons Let You Touch the Digital World”

“Device Puffs Virtual Objects Into Reality”

New Scientist

“Illusions to send shivers down a gamer’s spine”

Fast Company

“Disney Reinvents The Vibrator ... For Sensational Movies And Gaming”

“One Day Games Will Caress, Smack You”

MIT Technology Review

“A Touch Screen with Texture”

“When glass touch screens feel like sandpaper”

“Feel the future: Touch screens that touch back”