The Perceptual Engineering Lab is led by
Assistant Professor Jas Brooks at MIT, jointly affiliated with the
Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS)
and the
Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL).
We envision a future where people can adjust their senses as easily as they tweak their phone settings: reducing sweetness perception to discourage unhealthy eating, tweaking perceived temperature for comfort, or extending their sensory range to detect otherwise imperceptible hazards. Despite this potential, today's interfaces struggle to incorporate the "lower" senses (e.g., smell, taste, temperature, interoception) due to persistent challenges in power efficiency, miniaturization, and sensory selectivity. We address these barriers through perceptual engineering: the design of computational interfaces that sense and modulate human sensory perception. We build systems that deliver stimulation (e.g., thermal, chemical, electrical) paired with computational models that read physiological signals to decode and modify what the body perceives.
But perception doesn't only happen in the lab. We also study how the lower senses shape and support everyday experience (in health, aesthetics, and media), treating them as expressive and cognitive tools in their own right. These threads are mutually reinforcing: understanding how the senses operate in everyday life makes our engineered interfaces more meaningful, and advances in modulation open new questions about perception itself. Both draw on computer science, electrical engineering, neuroscience, and design toward a shared goal: giving people genuine, programmable agency over their own perception to help with their wellbeing.
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