Sensorimotor neuroscientist · University of Birmingham

From cortex
to fingertip.

I'm Diar Abdlkarim. I study how the brain moves the body — and build the technology that proves it.

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  • ARIANon-invasive BCI fellow
  • MetaQuest hand tracking
  • CHI 2025Best Paper Award
  • Motion DynamicsCo-founder
Live · 21 landmarks Open palm Markerless hand tracking x 0.0 y 0.0 z 0.0 mm
One question · Three instruments

How does the brain command the body?

Answering it means closing the loop between perception and action — reading the brain, probing touch, and measuring movement with precision.

01 — EEG

Record the brain.

EEG captures the neural signature of a movement — before the hand even begins to move.

Fingertip resting on a touch-testing device
02 — Psychophysics

Feel the touch.

Psychophysics reveals how skin senses contact, force and texture — and how touch shapes what we do next.

Rays from multiple cameras converging on a tracked hand
03 — Motion capture

Capture the motion.

Markerless motion capture measures action to the millimetre. No suits. No markers. Just movement.

Portrait of Diar Abdlkarim
Diar Abdlkarim · Birmingham, UK
About

From neural signal to shipped product. I work every step of that path.

My research asks a deceptively simple question: how does the brain command the body to act in the real world? Answering it means closing the loop between perception and action — reading neural signals, probing the sense of touch, and measuring movement with precision.

I founded and lead the University of Birmingham's markerless Movement Lab, and work as a research fellow on an ARIA-funded programme decoding naturalistic movement with non-invasive brain–computer interfaces. At Meta, I helped build the hand tracking now integral to Quest. And as co-founder of Motion Dynamics and Obi Robotics, I turn the science into hardware, haptics and XR software — then teach it to other scientists.

£1.5M+Research funding contributed
CHI 2025ACM Best Paper Award
150+Researchers trained
2Companies co-founded
Research

Four threads. One loop.

From the brain to the fingertip and back again — each thread feeds the next.

01 / BRAIN

EEG & brain–computer interfaces

Reading how motor plans are formed, predicted and corrected — now as a research fellow on an ARIA-funded programme decoding naturalistic movement with non-invasive BCIs.

02 / TOUCH

The science of touch

How the hand senses contact, force and texture — and how tactile feedback shapes the next movement.

03 / MOTION

Motion capture & tracking

Fine-grained sensorimotor measurement with markerless mocap and hand-tracking hardware, at experimental precision.

04 / XR

Immersive technologies

XR, HCI and human–robot systems that close the perception–action loop in real time — for research and rehabilitation.

Non-invasive BCIs · ARIA

Every movement
starts here.

Before a finger so much as twitches, the intention to move is already written across the motor cortex. On the ARIA-funded programme, I work on reading that intention non-invasively — decoding naturalistic movement without a single electrode beneath the skin.

This is the organ in question. Take it for a spin.

Drag to rotate · Pinch to zoom · AR on iPhone & iPad
Research spotlight

Touch, engineered.

Two flagship projects in haptics — feeling the world around you in VR, and feeling through a robot's hand.

Haptic belt system: a belt of voice-coil actuator units driven by a Raspberry Pi, worn while walking through a virtual environment in a Meta Quest 3 headset
Haptics · First-author · ACM CHI

Feel the room you can't see.

A wearable belt of voice-coil actuators that renders unseen obstacles as touch around the waist — restoring awareness of the real environment while fully immersed in VR. First-author work published at CHI 2026, the premier venue in human–computer interaction.

Voice-coil haptics Environmental awareness CHI 2026

Read the paper

Remote grasping system diagram: an operator wearing a VR headset and fingertip haptic thimbles controls a simulated remote robot gripper holding an unknown object
Human–robot interaction · Preprint

Remote grasping you can feel.

A teleoperation system in which fingertip haptic thimbles relay contact and slip from a remote robot gripper — so human dexterity can handle fragile, unknown objects at a distance. Currently available as a preprint.

Fingertip haptics Slip rendering Teleoperation
Meta · Reality Labs

Hand tracking.
Imperceptibly precise.

At Meta, I characterised the noise and jitter of camera-based hand tracking — then used psychophysical methods to measure exactly what the eye can detect. Those thresholds informed the filtering that holds jitter below perceivable levels, in the hand-tracking pipeline that ships on every Quest headset.

01 · MeasureNoise, characterised
02 · ThresholdJitter, below perception
03 · ShipOn every Quest
Hands tracked by Meta Quest headset cameras
Selected work

Ideas you can hold.

Hardware, software and studies that turn sensorimotor science into things people can use.

Kenilworth Revealed augmented-reality heritage experience
AR · Heritage

Kenilworth Revealed

AR that lets visitors step into Kenilworth's history — university innovation, delivered to the community.

Meta Quest markerless hand tracking
Meta · Quest

Markerless Hand Tracking

Camera-based hand tracking, now integral to the Quest line.

Hardware · Obi Robotics

Obi Robotics Glove

Every finger, tracked at high rate — with integrated haptics for precise XR and robotics control.

Motion Dynamics

Video in. Kinematics out.

Standard video becomes joint-level motion analytics — no suits, no markers, live from a single camera.

Fingertip resting on the Adaptive Touch Testing System's measurement platform
Clinical · BBSRC

Adaptive Touch Testing System

Portable fingertip assessment, built to speed tactile neuropathy diagnosis.

Immersive VR pool with wrist haptics
XR study

VR Pool + Haptics

A billiards task with impact-synchronised wrist feedback.

Fingertip indentation feedback device
Haptics

Fingertip Indentation Device

Physical button-press sensations, rendered with controllable indentation.

See all projects
Field notes

Where the work happens.

The markerless Movement Lab: motion-capture cameras surrounding a participant at a keyboard
The Movement Lab · Birmingham
Video to kinematics · Motion Dynamics
A serve, frame by frame
Teleoperating a robot arm through a haptic controller at the National Centre for Nuclear Robotics
Human–robot interaction · NCNR
Virtual avatar reaching for targets in a haptics study
Haptic navigation study · VR
The Motion Dynamics team at a technology exhibition stand
Motion Dynamics, on the road
Leadership

The conditions for new science.

Facilities, collaborations and companies that let new science happen — and the people mentored to deliver it.

Panoramic view of the Movement Lab markerless motion-capture facility, with ceiling-mounted cameras, tripods and a walkway
Infrastructure

The Movement Lab

I designed, specced and established a state-of-the-art markerless motion-capture facility — now a shared research asset used across groups at the University of Birmingham, and a magnet for collaborators and grant co-investigator roles.

Sign-language kinematics: a signer with annotated hand and face landmarks beside a 3D skeletal reconstruction
Supervision

A new research line

I opened an independent direction applying kinematic assessment to sign-language acquisition, and mentor the PhD researcher delivering it — reflected in our co-authored publications.

Participant wearing an EEG cap on a motion-platform flight simulator during a neuroscience and immersive-simulation study
Convening

Funded PhD capacity

I initiated a cross-college neuroscience × immersive-simulation collaboration — and converted it into a funded PhD studentship, bringing new research income and people into the group.

Research in the world: a packed auditorium, a professional squash tournament court, and a live broadcast production suite
Impact

Lab to world

Through Motion Dynamics, the Kenilworth Revealed AR heritage project and training courses for scientists, the research leaves the lab — as products, skills and community.

Publications

Peer-reviewed. Field-tested.

Selected work across HCI, sensorimotor neuroscience and XR.

2026

Belt and Whistles — Adding Lower Body Collision Awareness for MR Experiences

Abdlkarim, Mukherjee, Giunchi, Di Luca, Ofek
CHI
2025

Text Entry for XR Trove (TEXT)

Bhatia, Mughrabi, Abdlkarim, Di Luca, Gonzalez-Franco, Ahuja, Seifi
CHI · Best Paper
2024

A framework to assess the accuracy of VR hand-tracking systems

Abdlkarim, Di Luca, Aves, Maaß, Yeo, Miall, Wing, Hermosillo
Behavior Research Methods
2024

Development and validation of the ISV & ISPLD databases

Biotti, Sidnick, Hatton, Abdlkarim, Wing, Treasure, Happé, Brewer
Behavior Research Methods
2024

Hovering Over the Key to Text Input in XR

Gonzalez-Franco, Abdlkarim, Bhatia, Seifi, Ahuja, Di Luca
ISMAR
2024

Viewing angle matters in British Sign Language processing

Watkins, Abdlkarim, Winter, Thompson
Scientific Reports
2022

Robot, Pass me the Tool: Handle Visualisation for HRI

Ortenzi, Filipovica, Abdlkarim, Pardi, Takahashi, Wing, Di Luca, Kuchenbecker
HRI
Full publication list
Funding & awards

Backed to build.

Grants, awards and translation funding across research and enterprise.

CHI 2025

ACM Best Paper

Text Entry for XR Trove (TEXT) — a review of text input techniques.

£1.5M

EPSRC ARME

Named postdoc delivering XR music system integration & studies.

£15k

Google Research

Gift to explore ten-finger text entry for VR/AR.

£30k

ICURe Explore

Innovate UK market validation for the AR musician system.

Finalist

ICURe Exploit

Selected as a finalist; the fund was later withdrawn nationally.

£5k

BBSRC Touch Test

Portable tactile neuropathy assessment proof-of-concept.

EPSRC

PhD Studentship

Immersive biofeedback for upper-limb rehabilitation.

+ more

Full record

See the funding page →

Courses for scientists

Learn it in days.
Not years.

Intensive, hands-on training taught from real lab experience. Two cohorts a year. Small groups. You leave with something that works.

Game Engines for Scientists course
May 2027 · 4 days

Game Engines for Scientists

Build and run a VR experiment in a game engine — from empty scene to logged data.

Sign up
Motion Capture for Scientists course
June 2027 · 3 days

Motion Capture for Scientists

Set up, capture and analyse motion data end to end — calibration to kinematics.

Sign up

Not sure which fits — or want a course delivered to your lab?

Explore the courses →
Schools & outreach

The past, rebuilt for the classroom of the future.

Working with schools to bring immersive technology into children's learning — filming costumed historians against green screens and reconstructing historical environments in 3D, so pupils can step into the history they study.

Diar demonstrating a mixed-reality headset to schoolchildren dressed in period costume
In the classroom

Headsets meet history lessons

Pupils — dressed for the period themselves — explore immersive reconstructions in school sessions.

Costumed historical reenactors filmed against a green screen
Green screen

Filming the past

Costumed historians, keyed out and composited into 3D scenes.

Augmented-reality view of the reconstructed Kenilworth gatehouse, seen through a glowing portal on site
3D reconstruction

Lost buildings, rendered

Historical environments rebuilt in 3D and viewed in AR, on site.

Filming costumed reenactors performing a historical scene in a school hall
Production

A school hall becomes a film set

Scenes performed by reenactors, captured for the digital reconstructions children explore.

What's next · Fellowship under review

Growing minds,
hands first.

Watching children's hands move from objects to glass sparked the next research programme: how hands-on, effortful play builds young minds in a screen- and AI-mediated world — and how technology can hand that work back. I'm currently applying for a major international research fellowship to pursue it. More once I can share details.

Partner in this →
Hands writing on a tablet with a stylus Hands-On Minds emblem: a hand supporting a brain built from toy bricks
Contact

Say hello.

Collaborations, PhD supervision, speaking, consulting — or a conversation about how the brain moves the body. To join a course, use the course sign-up page.

✉
Emaildiarkarim@gmail.com
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Curriculum VitaeDownload PDF