Project Grant 2501545

This Project Grant award from the National Science Foundation's (NSF) Engineering program (CFDA 47.041) will fund research to develop a novel biometric identification system for extended reality (XR) applications, such as virtual reality (VR), augmented reality (AR), and mixed reality (MR). The project aims to leverage natural head movement patterns captured by sensors in XR head-mounted devices to continuously and unobtrusively authenticate users, addressing critical security challenges in these immersive technologies.

The $199,626 award to Miami University will support the implementation of an innovative neural network-based approach to extract user movement patterns for biometric identification. Key aspects include using advanced techniques like bidirectional recurrent neural networks, graph neural networks, and attention mechanisms to improve model performance. Additionally, the project will incorporate privacy-preserving federated learning and reinforcement learning strategies to enhance adaptability across diverse XR applications. The research is expected to deliver a highly secure, user-friendly identification system that advances the state-of-the-art in biometric authentication for XR technologies. The project duration is from October 1, 2025 to September 30, 2027.