The year 2009 has been a busy one for Project54.  We began the year off in February by moving from our garage facility in Madbury to a garage located on campus and within Morse Hall.  The transition of the group from two locations into one has been seamless and has worked out beautifully.  We now have all of our personnel and equipment housed in the same location.

In early May we held an open house to show off our new location as well as to celebrate our 10 year anniversary.  Hard to believe it has been 10 years for the project already.  The weather was great and we had a good turnout with a nice mix of law enforcement, fire dept and campus personnel.

The middle of March brought upon us a flurry of outreach activity beginning with our participation in the UNH High Tech Day a program put on by the Computer Science, Computer Engineering and Electrical and Computer Engineering departments for area high school students, ECE Open House to welcome freshman along with a steady stream of demonstrations and tours provided to visiting organizations and high schools that has continued through out the year totaling over 500 visitors!

In April we were fortunate enough  to have the opportunity to host Paul Green for a visit to our lab. He gave a great talk on Human Factors Engineering and spent the day visiting us and answering all of our questions.

Amidst our outreach activities demonstrating the Project54 system we have been busy traveling to a variety of conferences, where we have written and had papers and posters accepted for presentation as well as busy with developing and running a number of experiments. For example, Mike Farrar’s experiment “Using Voice to Tag Digital Photographs on the Spot” conducted to determine how effective voice could be in the tagging of photos. Some other experiments by Nemanja Memarovic, Alex Shyrokov and Zeljko Medenica using our driving-simulator and eyetracker to collect a variety of data pertaining to distracted driving and navigation.  During this time we were also busy with recruiting activities leading to the hire of Mark Taipan, a recent BS graduate and former student of Project54. We were very fortunate that Mark accepted the offer for our Research Project Engineer position and is now a staff member of the Project.  Welcome, Mark we are happy to have you as part of the P54 team!

One of the great things about this project is that we have a lot of great students that work with us but the time always arrives where they reach graduation and it seems all too quickly we have to say goodbye. This year we have said goodbye to undergraduates Matt Lape, and David Garneau along with graduates Mike Farrar, Nemanja Memarovic and very soon Alex Shyrokov who is currently preparing his Ph.D defense.  Lastly, Ivan Elhart is leaving us to return to his home country of Serbia. Ivan, thank you for all of your work with the handhelds. Undergraduate, Eric Ojala, who has been with us for roughly a year has also contributed greatly to progress on the handhelds and is, unfortunately for us, leaving to pursue a new position.  Good luck to everyone and thank you for all of your hard work on the project, you will be missed.

So now we are left with working on bringing more students to the project, new undergraduate faces we have currently working on the project are Devin Mullen, Erika Swanson, and Mike Litchfield who started earlier this year and we welcome new Graduate Research Assistants, Dylan Fransway and David Filipovic, who will be starting in January.

It has been a fun and productive year with the new year just around the corner.  Let the holidays begin!

~Erika C.

Many times when I go to Boston I try to pay a visit to a little shrine of technology called the Sony store in the Prudential Center. They always have some cool gadgetry on display. I was not disappointed a few weeks ago either. This time it was an all-in-one desktop computer that caught my eye, the Sony Vaio L Series. The best part: it is multitouch enabled running Windows 7.

Here at the lab we are very interested in multitouch technology as reported before. Our research is made even more relevant with the commercialization of affordable touch computers. Other companies have also come up with multitouch desktop systems for personal use: HP, Dell, etc. But Sony always puts a bit of extra effort in making their products even more stylish. And with the advent of Windows 7, an inherently multitouch operating system, touch computers start to make perfect sense. The Vaio L also dubs as an HDTV and a Blue-ray disk player/recorder.

I quickly double tapped the virtual globe application on the desktop. The Virtual Earth / Bing Maps style environment popped up quickly. I was multitouch navigating to my home town in no time. The feel of touching the computer screen was a little bit strange, because until now we all tried to keep fingers off from our beloved monitors. The feel of it was sleek, like our TouchKit table and unlike the Microsoft Surface, which is textured. All in all it was a very pleasant experience using this computer. It is going to be interesting to see how this new concept of human computer interaction will change the perception and use of desktop computers in the coming years.

Oszkar

Here at Project54, we work extensively with New Hampshire State Police. Subsequently, we have one of their 2006 Dodge Chargers for demonstrating and testing the Project54 system. One of my colleagues here at the University of New Hampshire, Daniel VanderClock, recently took the opportunity to take some photos of the interior and exterior of the car (some photos are shown below). The entire outstanding set can be seen on our Flickr account here.

Thanks Dan for your all of your wonderful work and we look forward to your future photo shoots!

Mark Taipan

A week ago Mike, Mark, Eric and me attended another NEC-HFES student research conference in Boston. It is an annual event where students from different areas of human-factors engineering have a chance to present their work and share their thoughts and ideas with other people. This time the conference was held at MIT’s Stata building.

We were very pleased to see that the quality of presented research increases every year. It is definitely the case that this conference is gaining on popularity as the number of participating universities rises. This year I was pleasantly surprised to see how many driving simulator related studies were presented. In the picture below you can see me while presenting my work.

As always, there was a very interesting keynote speaker. This year it was Dr. David Aurelio. He gave an interesting overview of his career and how he got into the area of human-factors. He also demonstrated some of the specific applications that he worked on for different companies over the years. His most recent experience was with the design of sound systems and in the picture below you can see a demonstration of the remote controller that he designed.

In general this was an interesting experience, and we are looking forward to it next year.

Zeljko Medenica

Last week Dennis O’Brien the Chief Electronics Engineer of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) gave a very interesting talk in the CEPS Frontiers lecture series. LLNL is one of the premier applied physics laboratories in the world. Together with Los Alamos, it is in charge of managing the US nuclear stockpile. It also runs a host of projects in the fields of national security and energy research.

Mr. O’Brien is a distinguished alumnus of UNH CEPS. He earned his BSc and MSc at our university in ‘75 and ‘77 respectively. Since then he was working at LLNL on various projects and at many positions. Currently he is the Chief Electronics Engineer of LLNL in charge of workforce planning and development for over 1300 engineers and other personnel.

At the beginning of the talk, Mr. O’Brien gave a quick overview of LLNL and its stunning achievements. He then spent the rest of the lecture introducing the National Ignition Facility, one of their most interesting and most expensive projects. It is essentially a huge laser (500 terawatt!) covering the area of three football fields. Its purpose is to generate enough energy to start nuclear fusion, with hydrogen as fuel, in a confined place. The idea is to generate more energy with fusion than it took to produce the laser beams. If this process of ‘ignition’ succeeds it could be the basic principle of future fusion powered power plants.

It was great to have such an accomplished alumnus give a talk at UNH. I think current students and faculty were very much inspired by the example of Mr. O’Brien’s great career and accomplishments.

Oszkar

Last Friday, a few of us from P54 attended a day long student conference geared towards human factors and ergonomics. The conference was very interesting, showcasing about 20 presentations dealing with various fields. Three of us from P54 (only ones from NH) gave presentations on our current research. I gave my presentation on our research on the multitouch display with geotagged & oriented photos.

It was a valuable experience for me, since I have not yet given a presentation to so many people whom I did not know. Of course, I was nervous at first, but it went away as my presentation started, and went well overall. I’m sure I will have to make more of these types of presentations in the future, so it was very good practice. Aside from my presentation, I also enjoyed a lot of other things from the conference. One of the other presentations was focused on controlling fully automated search and destroy robots in the field, and how often the person controlling them should reassess the goals and priorities of the robots.

Also the girl in the picture (one of three presenting) had an amazing voice. We all agreed she should be on radio or something, or a professional presenter. Mark and Zelijko gave awesome presentations too, and we all enjoyed some Friday evening rush hour traffic from Boston. It was great!

Mike Litchfield

A few days ago a new Microsoft Surface arrived to our labs. It is a great tool for user interaction studies. It’s surface material has a very pleasant non-stickiy textured feel to it.

Touch interactions on the Surface are recognized by multiple underlying infra-red cameras and transformed into user actions. The image is rendered by a projector located underneath the tabletop. The Surface is a really exciting user interface since it allows incredibly fast multi-touch and multi-user interactions. Not only can it detect the location of a finger on the tabletop, but also its orientation based on the shape of the infra-red blob.

We hope that this interface will allow researchers as well as students at UNH ECE to develop exciting new user experiences.

Oszkar

Last week I attended the “Exploring Mathematics Night,” which is an event organized annually by the UNH’s Department of Mathematics and Statistics. This is always a very interesting event intended to promote mathematics and encourage young people with degrees in mathematics about the vast opportunities that are available after graduation. This year was no exception and we had a chance to listen to five very interesting panelists (see the picture below). They shared with the audience their experiences about their job search right after the graduation as well as more recent experiences in their current companies. Visiting this event is definitely a very nice experience and I highly recommend it.

Zeljko Medenica

Apple recently unveiled one of its newest creations: a mouse that responds to gestures and finger movements instead of the usual clicks and scroll wheel that come standard on a regular mouse. Dubbed “Magic Mouse“, this mouse uses a special optical laser that can read movement on any surface. This means the user does not have to have a mouse pad; the Magic Mouse can be used on just about any surface. One of the best features of this mouse is that it allows the user to have many different mouse configurations in one. For example, a left handed person can configure the mouse so that right click will be on the left side of the mouse, which fits a left handed person better. The mouse allows its user to click and double click anywhere on the touch surface, as well as utilize a scroll function that is harnessed by dragging a finger along the surface of the mouse. Another great feature of this mouse is that it allows a user to hold down the control key on the keyboard and drag a finger along the touchpad to zoom in. The Magic Mouse also offers a “momentum scrolling” option, where the user can increase the scrolling speed of the mouse by dragging their finger faster or slower along the touchpad.

 Devin Mullen

Matthew Lape, a recently graduated Project54 student, passed along this interesting video (shown below) regarding a device being developed at MIT called SixthSense. This wearable gesture-driven device consists of a pocket projector, a camera, and a mirror. These components are driven by the user’s smartphone and allow the user to make various gestures on different surfaces to not only obtain information (such as detecting what items the user picks up at the grocery store) but to also display information pertinent to the user (is the item a good buy for the user?). It’s certainly interesting to see the importance of not only selecting pertinent information to show the user, but the methods on how to display them is equally important as well. Here at Project54, Michael, Ankit, and Oszkar provide an example on the importance of displaying information with work on the multi-touch table.

Mark Taipan