Puneet Jain

Puneet is an artist and researcher working at the intersection of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), eXtended Reality (XR), Artificial Intelligence, and Disability Studies. Puneet’s artistic-research practice questions the embedded ableism in technologies of XR - an umbrella term for Virtual/Augmented Reality and body-worn interfaces. His current obsession lies in hacking and modifying XR technologies to make them accessible for the disabled communities, particularly for his friends with quadriplegia/tetraplegia. Puneet collaborates closely with disabled artists and activists, using the adapted accessible XR technologies as artistic strategies to create immersive storytelling to unsettle and provoke the common misconceptions around disabilities.
Puneet’s work has been showcased at venues such Ars Electronica (Linz, Austria), Culturgest (Lisbon, Portugal), xCoAx (Treviso, Italy), Khoj Studios (Delhi, India). He is currently pursuing his PhD at Concordia University in Montreal, Canada, and holds a Master’s degree in Computational and Data Sciences. Previously, he worked at the Interaction Design Lab at IISc Bangalore and as a Data Scientist at SAP Labs Bangalore.