Creative at heart, Media engineer by training, Human-Centered by conviction.
Niko Pallas is a HCI graduate student at LMU Munich / CDTM and a media engineer with 5+ years of experience building interfaces, experiences and real-time content for live productions.
Currently I am looking for a master’s thesis at the intersection of human-centered AI, embodied interaction and trust in intelligent systems.
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Move your cursor left–right over the photo to rack focus — click when it locks sharp. What's a rangefinder camera? ↗
Selected work
Zen Belt — Intelligent Deformable Interfaces for Guided Breathing
A wearable belt that guides box-breathing through pressure, vibration, and audio - guiding your breathing instead of dictating it.
VirtuEnkel — Patient Tech Support for Seniors
A retro desk lamp that coaches seniors through their own smartphones, using voice and a laser that points at the screen.
CollaboRobot — Nonverbal Human–Robot Negotiation
A human and a robot arm decide what to cook together: No speech, no script, just noverbal negotiation.
circle — Reoccuring Prompts for Closer Friendships
A daily question for the friend-circles: Answer first, then consume.
LED-Wall Color Correction — Following the Viewing Angle
Measuring why a camera never sees different colors based on the viewing angle and building a correction proposal.
Neumann & Müller — Interactive Exhibits & Real-Time
Designing, developing, and programming interactive exhibits/ prototypes and real-time content for fairs, events, and live shows.
Freelance Virtual Production & XR
Designing and operating live XR / virtual-production stages for broadcast: Real-time rendered interactive scenes on disguise media servers, live and unscripted.
Young Explorers Program — Empowering Young Changemakers
10+ years empowering young people to fall in love with wild nature infront of their doorsteps and to become changemakers for biodiversity and climate
Photography
My ongoing semi-professional hobby: nature, people and music. Photography feeds back into how I think about moments, framing and light in everything else I build.
Ekstase — Animated Short
A 3D animated short film: The energy of music triggers a euphoria in which the inner self escapes and reshapes the exterior.
Opera — Media Design & Projection Mapping
Visual design and on-stage projection media for a contemporary staging of two operas: Orpheus & The Little Prince
From building “cool stuff” to researching how people use them.
Munich, Germany
- M.Sc. Human-Computer-Interaction LMU Munich
- Honors Degree in Technology Management CDTM
- B.Eng. Audiovisual Media HdM Stuttgart
I came to HCI from industry — building interactive exhibits and live virtual productions as a Freelancer and at Neumann & Müller before moving into my Masters in HCI at LMU Munich, alongside CDTM's Technology Management track.
I enjoy research that stays close to real systems and real people. Sometimes that's a physical prototype (haptic devices, robots...), sometimes it's a working "intelligent" system, but always including people.
Mixing engineering with HCI research is what I enjoy, turning an idea into something people can actually try. I also like the earlier part of the human-centered design process: talking to people and understanding their problems before building anything.
Since 2016 I've led the Young Explorers Program (wilderness and biodiversity education for young adults) and I was the first employee at Hula Earth, an early-stage biodiversity-monitoring startup, for the past 1.5 years.