This summer I have had a great opportunity to be an intern at Mitsubishi Electric Research Labs (MERL) in Cambridge, MA. This is not only a great prospect for my professional career, but also a chance to experience how working in a real company looks like.

MERL is a daughter company of the Mitsubishi Electric Corporation from Japan and therefore they have close collaboration. As the name implies, it is a research facility where people work on many different areas, such as digital communications, multimedia, user interfaces, speech interaction, mechatronics and many others. Their overwhelming publications page just confirms how important research is in this institution.

As a MERL intern, I am a member of the speech group. My advisor here is Bret Harsham and for this summer we have been working on testing an in-car speech user interface which was developed here at MERL. This interface enables contacts, music and points-of-interest selection using voice commands. The experiments will be concerned with the influence this interface may have on driving performance and will be performed on their driving simulator (shown in the picture below).

The driving simulator is based on a racing game simulation and consists of three huge DLP projector screens which create a very wide field-of-view, force feedback steering wheel and pedals, and a motion chair. The motion chair is very powerful, because it simulates the vibrations caused by road surface and engine, as well as the tilting of the car caused by acceleration and deceleration. The feeling it produces is very realistic and it may help prevent simulator sickness which was so common in our simulator studies.

We are looking forward to publishing the results of this interesting study. So, stay tuned for more info on this topic.

Zeljko Medenica

Microsoft is either loved or hated by most of society these days. But no matter where you stand on the company, you have to agree that the vision they show in the video below is amazing, and displays great contributions to society. The video is an envisioned future of 2019, just ten years ahead. It’s amazing how Microsoft takes the time to make such a production out of their ideas for future technology, so that the rest of society can understand their vision. My favorite part is the personal devices that people carry around, which interact with many other devices wherever they go. Enjoy.

Mike Litchfield

In this article from MSNBC.com, the Associated Press explains how Cyberdyne, a Japanese Robotics company has been showing off their newly designed rehabilitation suit. The HAL (hybrid assistive limb) is aimed to help those with weak leg muscles and mobility issues in daily life. It has sensors that read brain signals directing limb movement through the skin and sends them to the mechanical leg braces that are strapped to the thighs and knees, as well as belted to the waist.

Although it is very expensive now, it may be more affordable in the future, and definitely seems like a more portable option for some people with disabilities.

Mike Litchfield

Last week an interesting lecture was held by Dr. Frank Rudolph of Beacon Power about flywheel energy storage systems as part of the UNH’s energy club series of seminars on renewable energy.

Flywheels are not a new concept, but the technological development in the last 10 years or so made it feasible to become a commercial product. How a flywheel storage system works? The concept is actually pretty simple: it absorbs energy from the grid and stores it in a high-density rotating flywheel. The flywheel thus acts as a kinetic energy battery. Since it spins at very high speeds (>20000 rpm) it is capable of providing very high bursts of energy in a very short period of time. It consists of an electric motor enclosed in a vacuum container and suspended on magnetic bearings. This way almost no losses are encountered due to inertia in the bearings and the surrounding air. After the power loss the motor acts as a generator, converting stored kinetic energy into electric energy.

There are many possible uses for flywheels: trains, cars, uninterruptible power supplies, pulse power, but one of the most interesting is the frequency regulation of the grid. By observing frequency changes it is possible to determine if the power demand is higher (frequency drops) or lower (frequency rises) than the supply. Given the property of the flywheels to deliver high amounts of energy in short periods of time, it sounds like a very promising solution to a very complex problem of power management.

Zeljko Medenica

Two new SeeingMachines eye trackers have arrived to the P54 lab. They have successfully survived their long trip from Australia in their well rugged cases.

We have already one eye tracker from the same company installed in our driving simulator. This tracker has provided us with lots of interesting new data on driver behavior. Some of the results of the eye tracker usage can be found in my Master’s Thesis. We have also submitted two papers for conferences with data from the eye tracker. We also have a number of prototype experiments designed using the tracker.

With the two new systems we hope to
1) increase the quality of tracking in the simulator
2) have one system installed in a real car for naturalistic driving experiments
3) use one system part-time on different other devices for user interface research

The quality of eye tracking in the simulator can be increased with additional systems that can be connected using the faceLAB Link application. Installing cameras near a GPS screen or near the central console will give us more precise tracking information on these locations.

Two eye trackers’ output can be integrated into a single stream of data using faceLAB Link, which is a part of the faceLAB package. The computers of these eye trackers must be connected via network, and faceLAB must be running on both of them. After that, faceLab Link can be started on one of them. It automatically recognizes all trackers on the network. There is no need for separate calibration, because the application calculates the location of the two eye trackers automatically, when they are tracking the same face. When the data is fused together, it can be found in Link’s logging folder instead of the faceLAB logging folder. In order to have correct object intersection data, the data streams must be ‘re-coded’ using WorldView (another application in the package). This must be done, because the ’slave’ eye tracker cannot produce gaze intersections with the virtual world objects of the ‘master’ tracker. But loading Link’s logged data and the world model of the ‘master’ system, and then re-coding it by pressing on the ‘record’ button, produces object intersections of the integrated data stream with the master’s world model. The output of this re-coding is recorded in WorldView’s logging folder.

We are very excited to use these systems in our research. The results of these experiments will be published on this site, so check back soon.

Oszkar Palinko

This is a follow up to my previous post about automation solution for our experiments. Taking the automation a step further I have designed Experiment Wizard.

Experiment Wizard is a cross platform open source automation tool for scientific experiments. It defines the XML schema for experiment administration, and provides GUI application to execute created experiments. It can be a replacement of a checklist or a complete automation tool. It can be used for human-human or human-computer experiments or any other type of an experiment that uses computers, which can be connected into a network.

Go to Experiment Wizard home page to download the Executable for windows or sources that can be compiled on another operating system. It comes with a tutorial and documentation for the schema file. Any feedback is welcome.

Alexander Shyrokov.

During our experiments we use questionnaires to collect some data. So far we have used paper questionnaires. The major advantages of paper questionnaires are: ease of administration (subjects know what to do with them); and ease of creation (using a word processor). On the other hand,  there are two major flaws: unintentional incompleteness (subjects miss some questions); and data entry errors (transfer from paper to digital form is error prone). We are looking into an alternative method of questionnaire administration. The most likely solution is the delivery of computerized questionnaires through a survey application, such as LimeSurvey, an open source php based survey application. LimeSurvey allows an easy creation of questionnaires, while providing full control over the survey presentation. The questionnaires and data can be exported/imported using csv format. Questionnaires can also be printed and with the help of queXML and queXF the conversion of the data from paper into digital format can be automatic.

Alexander Shyrokov

Recently I ran across this very interesting video about how to perform head tracking using a Wii remote. But, this is not all. Using this principle it is possible to change the perspective of the picture shown on the screen, which makes the illusion of having a 3D display. Although it works only for one person at a time, I think it is a very neat idea. Take a look and decide for yourself:

Zeljko Medenica

UNH students, staff and faculty now have access to the IEEE/IET Electronic Library (for a description of what IEL provides click here).

I would like to thank Jennifer Carroll and Emily Poworoznek of the UNH Library for acquiring this excellent resource for our campus.

Andrew Kun

As Matt and Mike pointed out, several of the students here at Project54 attended the NECHFES 2008 Student Conference at Northeastern. Being from a suburb of Boston, it was nice to be in the city again and Northeastern served as a great venue for this conference. Several students from around New England (predominantly from the Boston area) presented and while each was interesting, there were a few presentations from other universities that especially captured my attention.

At Project54, we find that video demonstrations go a long way in describing the experiment, the problem, the environment, etc. One video from UMASS Lowell by T. Do showed the environment of a shrimp factory in Vietnam; it was interesting to see the human factors considerations (or lack thereof).

Another video by Romoser from UMASS Amherst showed the result of attaching a camera to a person’s head to show the amount of secondary looks taken while making turns. He showed that there are specific intervention techniques that can improve an older driver’s performance behind the wheel.

S. Gabree from Northeastern had one of the best short student presentations I have seen. His audience interaction displaying the adjustments our vision makes with contrast and color replacement was “eye opening” and fun! He and Zeljko both won the best student presentation awards given by the two sponsors of the conference (Aptima, Inc. and Charles River Analytics, Inc.). Congrats to you both! I sure have learned a lot from not just their presentations, but everyone’s. Be sure to check out the abstracts of the participants of the conference here. I sure hope that I have the opportunity to do this again. My thanks go out to Matt, Professor Kun, Oskar Palinko, the rest of Project54, and NECHFES for making this an enjoyable experience!