Jan
20

Airhockey Game Demo

This is a quick view of what our game will look like.

In the video the game is running on the Microsoft Surface Simulator. The control method shown in the video is the Surface’s touch interface.

The game is built on the Microsoft’s XNA graphics engine, which works really well for setting up a framework to implement the various aspects needed to make our game playable. We’ve also created a custom physics engine which allows us to create unique and independent simulations of each object. This provides us with a highly customizable system to implement and compare different input methods.

Stay tuned for our next demo which will contain accelerometer based control of the mallets.

Jan
20

Accelerometer plotting in MATLAB

The current project I am working on concerns reading data from an accelerometer in order to move a player in an air hockey game being played on the Microsoft Surface. There is a delay in tracking fast movements on the surface which can be an issue when playing a game. The idea is to cut out that delay by determining when the surface has lost track of the user, and when that happens send the surface calculated velocities based off the accelerometers readings.

Air hockey controller

The above image is a picture of the controller that is used to play the air hockey game. It communicates with the computer over a serial bluetooth connection, in which it sends acceleration data to the PC whenever it is requested.  From those readings I am able to determine the acceleration in m/s² from which I derive the velocity and position.  These values are then saved in a database which upon termination of the program are written to a file.  That file is then read in using MATLAB and is plotted as seen below:

X plots from MATLAB
Y Plots from MATLAB

By storing this data and reading it into MATLAB I open up a lot of options in data analysis which will become useful if a problem arises. Soon I hope to post a video of the controller during gameplay scenarios!

Jan
20

Mapping Data On The Microsoft Surface Within InfoStrat.VE

Over the Winter Break here at Project54 I have had the chance to work on developing an application for the Microsoft Surface. This project uses the InfoStrat Virtual Earth software, which provides an excellent template of an interactive 3D world using Bing Maps.

veMap

My application uses environmental data (in this demo sediment levels in water). The locations for the data are mapped on initialization as you can see below. The sediments and their corresponding levels can be viewed for each location by touching the pushpin.

locations_02

 

Each location can then be added to a list for graphing. Once the user has selected the locations he/she wants, they can use checkboxes to determine which sediments to graph.

toGraph

selectSediments

Now this data is graphed using Excel.

graphing

 

There is still much to be implemented into this application. One main goal is to use less basic controls such as checkboxes and buttons, and use more NUI appropriate controls such as tagged objects. Developing for the Microsoft Surface has been a huge learning experience and lots of fun! I definitely look forward to the continued development of this project.

Jan
20

Back in Flight!

After updating my software to use a more efficient method of video stream communication between the drone and the surface, I had a vast number of complications which wound up with a non-responsive drone and software that could do nothing more than lift off and land the drone. After extensive testing, debugging, and reverting some of the changes I made to the application I now have a working drone flying in the desired directions that I tell it.

Basic Button System

I currently implemented a basic button-press system for control of the flight however a basic autonomous flight pattern is in the nearby future for implementation. Not to mention my screenshot saving works properly now – which opens doors to some really exciting demos!

AR Drone Screenshot

Dec
19

AutomotiveUI 2011

Last week professor Kun and I came back from AutomotiveUI 2011. This time the conference took place in beautiful Salzburg, Austria.

The conference was hosted by the University of Salzburg, located in the city’s “Old Town,” which is well known for its baroque architecture and was listed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1997. Salzburg was also the birthplace of the 18th century composer Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.

This was the third annual conference and based on the number of registrants it is gaining on popularity. A total of 25 submissions were accepted for publication and they came from 10 countries, as can be seen in the chart below:

The main conference was preceded with four workshops:  Subliminal Perception in Cars, Cognitive Load and In-Vehicle Human-Machine Interaction, AutoNUI: Automotive Natural User Interfaces and Integrating Mobile Devices into the Car Ecosystem – Tablets and Smartphones as Vital Parts of the Car. Professor Kun and I participated in the cognitive load workshop, where we presented a preliminary study (done with Peter A. Heeman and Oskar Palinko) about estimating cognitive workload changes during spoken human dialogue using pupil diameter measures. The picture below shows the atmosphere during our workshop:

The first day of the conference started off with an inspiring keynote given by Bryan Reimer of MIT’s Age Lab. The talk was geared towards raising awareness about the problems created by the introduction of various in-vehicle interfaces, whose development is progressing at a faster rate than what an average driver can adapt to, thus causing a “disconnect” between the technology and the drivers. Bryan also highlighted some of the research related to state detection, driver distraction and new in-vehicle technology evaluations that is being conducted at the MIT’s Age Lab.

The paper sessions were very diverse and covered various topics, from modeling interactions, messaging in motion, modes of interaction to the user interfaces in electric vehicles. I presented a paper titled “Evaluating the Usability of a Head-Up Display for Selection from Choice Lists in Cars.” This study was performed with Garrett Weinberg and Bret Harsham during my last year’s internship at Mitsubishi Electric Research Labs in Cambridge, MA.

After a day full of lectures, the participants had a chance to socialize over a dinner, which was organized in the Salzburg’s Hohensalzburg Castle. The castle is located on a hill dominating the old part of the city. It is one of the largest and best preserved medieval castles in Europe. The picture below shows how the ambient looked like during the dinner.

Overall the conference was very successful. It raised many new questions about the avenues that should be taken in the future and once again stressed how important the area of automotive research is. The tradition will be continued next year and this time AutoUI is coming to our neighborhood – Portsmouth, NH, USA. Here is professor Kun announcing AutoUI 2012. We are looking forward to it!

Zeljko Medenica

Nov
09

The NEC HFES Visit to UNH

On Saturday, November 5th, a delegation of the New England Chapter of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society (NEC HFES) visited our labs at the University of New Hampshire. First, Andrew Kun, the Project54 program director, gave an overview of the research conducted in our labs. Next, Eric Jones, Sami Durrani, Angela Garabet and David Aurelio introduced themselves and gave quick career overviews of how one becomes a human factors professional. As it turns out, educational background in this field is quite diverse but mostly centered around engineering. After this, our visitors gave some very good advices to P54 students on best approaches on how to find a job in this field. Not surprisingly, it is important to have a strong set of transferable engineering skills and knowledge (Matlab, SPSS, LabView, etc), but people skills and appearance are also very important. One has to show great enthusiasm for the job and prove that s/he can be a pleasant person to work with.

Next, the group made its way to our Surface and simulator labs where Project54 students presented their research topics with demos and posters.

The meeting had a very friendly and constructive atmosphere. Hopefully NEC HFES and Project54 will have even stronger bonds in the future thanks to this visit.

 

Oszkar

Oct
26

Experiences from the 2011 NEC HFES conference

Ten days ago Project54 students once again attended the annual NEC HFES student conference. According to the organizers, this year’s conference broke all records with respect to the number of submitted student papers. The picture below shows how the atmosphere at the conference looked like.

There were 18 presenters in total, which amounted to the full day of interesting presentations. The presented material covered various topics in the domain of human factors. Since my work is in the area of driving simulator research, I was happy to see that it was well represented. In the picture below you can see me while giving my presentation.

My favorite part of the conference was the keynote, which was given by Richard Gardner of Boeing Research and Technology.

The talk gave us a completely new perspective about how to solve the everyday problems that workers face while assembling airplanes. Most of the problems are related to injuries arising from awkward body positions, excess stress on joints and muscles and high force work. Since the planes are very complex systems, most of the assembly must be done manually by workers. As a result, a long term exposure to various stresses can result in injuries. The picture below shows one example solution (“sideways rolling chair”), which enables workers to reduce the stress that they experience while fastening rivets to the body of the airplane.

In general I highly recommend this conference. Its relaxed setting enables students to break into giving research presentations at large venues as well as offering a chance for networking with fellow researchers and established professionals.

Zeljko Medenica

Oct
19

My Freshman Year Internship at Explosive Ordnance Disposal

Hi, my name is Emily Car, I am a senior Electrical Engineering major at UNH, and in my short career I have held 3 different jobs in the Engineering field. I have gotten very fortunate to work from one engineering aspect to another. In this entry I am going to write about my first internship.

Starting my freshman year, in ECE 401 Professor Chamberlin had an abundance of speakers from all different aspects of the EE field donate their time and give presentations of their careers. Some presenters were parents or local celebrities, but the one presentation that blew me away (pun intended =]) was on Explosive Ordnance Disposal (EOD). EOD in short, cleans up and protects people from explosive matter. This job sounded fascinating, working with real bombs, and saving the lives of people overseas. I applied to the internship later that week. The challenge to this internship was it was in Indian Head Maryland, over 500 miles from home. I took the job right after they offered me the internship, a sublet, and one of the department heads to help me out while I was down there.

In 10 short weeks I learned all about being a government employee, working overtime, work travel, jammer systems, soldering, oscilloscopes and inventory. I was put in the testing department and worked on mostly jammers systems that block radio frequencies of those used to detonate road side bombs. This was an interesting department, since I worked with young engineers and retired military personnel; this created a balance on the products having practicality and accuracy.

This internship was a great job and it has gotten my foot in the door to many different interviews. I decided to stay in New Hampshire for my other internships and jobs, but I learned to always keep my eyes open to new opportunities.

Oct
19

2011 NEC HFES Student Conference

View from Microsoft NERD Center

This past Friday I traveled to Boston for the 2011 Student Conference organized by the New-England Chapter of Human Factors and Ergonomics Society. It was hosted at the Microsoft NERD Center in Cambridge, with a beautiful view of the Charles River Basin, shown in the figure above. Project54 had seven UNH graduate and undergraduate students in attendance: Zeliko Medednica, Shawn Bryan, Bobby Moore, David Filipovic, me, Josh Clairmont and Nicholas Sjostrom (from left to right in the image below).

Project54 Students at NEC HFES Conference

Students from MIT, Tufts, Harvard, Bentley, UMASS and Northeastern University joined us to make student presentations or show posters of their studies. The student presentations were very interesting and ranged from studies with robot-assisted surgical settings to driving simulator experiments. The variety of topics kept us attentive throughout the whole day. The projects with topics on distractions in the driving simulators were especially interesting to me because they relate closely to my research.

My Research Poster

I brought a poster, shown above, on Customer Subjective Evaluations of Speech-to-Text Applications. I conducted this evaluation to get a better understanding of currently deployed applications that allow users a safe texting while driving experience.  I found that people really enjoy these applications and proactively work to make the road safer by using them. The dictation applications do not require the driver to look down and physically type a message. However they still distract the driver by requiring the user to look down to push buttons in order to start and finish sending a message. Overall these applications are a step in the right direction, but do not eliminate all the risks of texting while driving.

Boeing 787 Dreamliner in construction

Sharing my poster with the other students, officers and sponsors gave me a great chance to hear outside opinions on my research. It also provided time to network with sponsors that came from Liberty Mutual, Charles River Analytics, Aptima Inc. and Volpe. One associate from each company gave a presentation summarizing the interesting aspects of their work. The keynote speaker, Richard Gardner provided a thought provoking presentation. As an Ergonomist and Technical Fellow at Boeing, he went over different ways he helped workers on the Boeing’s 787 Dreamliner, shown in images above and below, find more comfort in their particular work environments. Some interesting examples of this is the use of leaning chairs to reduce neck and shoulder strain for workers under a wing, and a cushioned platform for workers reaching down into the plane.

Boeing 787 Dreamliner

Carol Perkins

Sep
19

Experiences from MobileHCI 2011

This year’s MobileHCI conference was held in wonderful Stockholm, Sweden. I was lucky enough to have both a paper accepted for publication and also to serve as a student volunteer.

Stockholm is a beautiful city. With its 14 islands and numerous bridges, it is rightly referred to as the “Venice of the North. “ Below is a photo which shows the area around the conference venue.

The conference itself took place in a beautiful old brewery, Münchenbryggeriet, which is located in the south part of central Stockholm.

The conference lasted for four days, with over 300 people attending. The program was very diverse with workshops, two lecture tracks, industrial panels, posters, demos, industrial cases and exhibitions. The following picture shows the opening announcement by Oskar Juhlin, who was one of the program chairs.

The opening announcement was followed by a very interesting keynote by Jeanna Kimbré of SonyEricsson, who gave an overall perspective on the design process that is employed when designing new cell phones.

The first conference day ended with a reception dinner. It was held across the conference venue at the Stockholm’s City Hall, famous for being the venue of the Nobel Prize banquet. Since it is located on the other side of Riddarfjärden bay, we had to board the ferries, which gave us a nice view of the City Hall and its surroundings.

The picture below shows the Golden Hall, the room where the reception dinner was held. It was named after the decorative mosaics, which consist of more than 18 million tiles!

The last day of the conference ended with a keynote by Adrian Cheok of Keio University, Japan. He gave an overview of the various projects he and his collaborators are working on in the area of human-computer interaction. One of their ideas that I found very interesting and even provoking is to try to make people feel more connected when they are far from each other by transmitting taste, smell, emotions and even feelings.

The conference was very well organized (and not just because I was one of the volunteers :) ), with 25 enthusiastic student volunteers who helped things run as smoothly as possible. I am very happy that I had a chance to serve as a volunteer, since it gave me an opportunity to meet even more interesting people than when just being an attendee and also made me appreciate further all the “background” work that is necessary for a successful conference. Each student volunteer had several shifts every day during which we performed registration, directed people to various sessions, handled microphones during lectures, helped presenters with the equipment, etc. Between the shifts we had a chance to attend sessions and talk to other attendees. The following picture shows one of the student volunteers’ organizational meetings.

Overall, I can say that MobileHCI 2011 offered plenty of high quality research from various areas of human-computer interaction. Thus, I am looking forward to the next year’s MobileHCI, which will be held in San Francisco.

Zeljko Medenica

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