Anton Nijholt is interested in non-traditional human-computer interaction issues. These issues include irrational behavior, deception, food, and humor. They are included in research on entertainment computing, augmented reality, brain-computer interfacing, multimodal interaction, affective interaction, and modelling interactions in smart environments, including human-human interaction, human-robot interaction, human-virtual agent interaction, and playable cities.

He has been program chair or general chair of the main international conferences of affective computing (ACII), entertainment computing (ACE, INTETAIN, ICEC), virtual agents (IVA), faces & gestures (FG), and some others. He organised many workshops on related topics, such as multisensorial augmented reality, humor engineering, human-food interaction, playable cities, and brain-computer interfacing. Recent edited books are "Playable Cities: The City as a Digital Playground", "Making Smart Cities more Playable", and "Brain Art: Brain-Computer Interfaces for Artistic Expression".

Nijholt held positions at various universities in Belgium and the Netherlands. He acted as supervisor for about fifty Ph.D. students. During some years Nijholt was scientific advisor of Philips Research, Eindhoven. He has been research-fellow at McMaster University (Canada), the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities and Social Sciences, the Imagineering Institute in Malaysia, and member of Microsoft's Technical Leadership Advisory Board. Nijholt is Chief Editor of the section Human-Media Interaction of Frontiers in Psychology and Frontiers in Computer Science, Springer Book Series Editor Gaming Media and Social Effects, and many editorial boards.

Research Papers 

In preparation are two edited books (on playful augmented reality and a second book on brain art) that are planned to appear late 2022 or early 2023.