More recently, NYU, Harrison's undergraduate alma mater named him as their 2014 Distinguished Young Alumnus,[12] and the lab also won a Fast Company Innovation by Design Award for their work on EM-Sense.

During his master's studies, Harrison worked at IBM Research - Almaden on an early personal assistant application called Enki under Mark Dean, then the director of the lab.

After completing his master's degree, Harrison worked at AT&T Labs, developing among the first asynchronous social video platforms, dubbed CollaboraTV, with features now common in modern systems.

Harrison broadly investigates novel sensing and interface technologies, especially those "that empower people to interact with small devices in big ways".

Insights from this work, especially the vibroacoustic propagation of touch inputs, led to Skinput being developed while Harrison was interning at Microsoft Research.

[25] In 2017, Robert Xiao, an HCII PhD student, along with Harrison and Scott Hudson, his advisors, created Desktopography,[26] an interactive multi-touch interface that is projected onto a desktop surface.

Inspired by the Xerox PARC DigitalDesk, one of the first digitally augmented desks of its time, Desktopography explores the possibilities of virtual-physical interactions and deals with how to best create a user-friendly interface which has to navigate around various, constantly moved objects, as commonly found on one's desktop surface.

Harrison co-developed and co-wrote Crash Course Computer Science, a PBS Digital Studios-funded educational series hosted on YouTube, with his partner, Amy Ogan.

[citation needed] Along with Robert Xiao and Scott Hudson, colleagues at CMU, he developed Lumitrack, a motion tracking technology which is currently used in video game controllers and in the film industry.