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 …
Category Archive: Driving simulator
Aug
19
Infrared Illumination when Measuring Pupil Diameter
In most of our experiments here at Project54 we incorporate eye tracking. It is useful, not only to be aware of where a subject is looking, but it can also measure pupil diameter which is an indicator of cognitive load. Over the years we have simply discounted unreliable data. Most of that unreliable data is …
Jun
07
Calibrating Steering Encoder for UNH Driving Simulator
Since we upgraded our Drive Safety DS-600C driving simulator with the new version of the software, we noticed that the reading for the steering wheel angle was incorrectly calibrated. Namely, even though the steering wheel can be rotated about 1.5 full turns in both directions (which would amount to approximately -540° to +540° lock-to-lock) the …
Dec
17
Automotive UI 2010
This November, a few of my colleagues and I attended the Automotive UI 2010 Conference, held in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. The conference attracted a significant number of high quality presenters active in the field of automotive user interface research and design. It was held during two consecutive days and had the Bill Gates building at the …
Dec
05
Illumination Experiment
Amongst the many metrics that an eye tracker generates, pupil diameter as a metric has grabbed the attention of many eye tracking researchers. It is well known that the pupil diameter changes with respect to stimuli such as pain, arousal, auditory signals, cognitive demands and illumination etc. As an intern at the Project54 lab at …
Dec
02
Garrett Weinberg's Visit
As a continuation of the great series of lectures in the ECE900 Graduate Seminar, on November 18th we hosted Garrett Weinberg of the Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories (MERL). Garrett is a Member of the Research Staff at MERL in Cambridge, MA and I had a chance to work with him for the second year in …
Oct
21
Lexus Driving Simulator
The future of simulated driving has arrived… The developers at the Lexus research campus at Higashifuji, Japan, have created a highly sophisticated driving simulator. According to the automotive company, this is the largest and the most advanced driving simulator available today. The simulator serves as a symbolic pledge of Lexus’ dedication to the concept of …
Sep
17
MERL Summer Internship
This summer I had another great internship at the Mitsubishi Electric Research Labs (MERL) in Cambridge, MA. This time my host was Garrett Weinberg. My experiences from MERL are extremely positive, not only because I had an opportunity to work on high-end research, but also because of people that I directly collaborated with. Similar to …
Apr
01
Bret Harsham talk at UNH
A couple of weeks ago our ECE department hosted Bret Harsham of Mitsubishi Electric Research Labs (MERL) as a part of the ECE900 graduate seminar. Bret gave a very interesting lecture about the ways of shortening voice dialogs through using a contextual push-to-talk button. The title of the lecture was “Contextual Push-to-Talk: Shortening Voice Dialogs …
Oct
14
A Visit to MIT AgeLab
Last week my colleague Zeljko Medenica and I visited AgeLab of the Massachussetts Institute of Technology. The visit was organized by the New England Chapter of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society (NEC-HFES). This laboratory is investigating the role of technology in the human aging process. One of the big issues that older people face …