Continue reading »]]> Over the past few weeks I have been finishing up my senior project work here at Project54. The goal of this project is to have a wireless interface that is capable of controlling police cruiser devices from the outside of the car. Up to this point I have successfully implemented both Bluetooth and Wi-Fi connections between a handheld Motorola PDA and an Arduino micro-controller. Recently I have improved these connections and have been able to actually send commands to devices in the cruiser, ultimately allowing a user to wirelessly control these devices from his or her PDA. As of now the application allows for control of the light bar and siren on a demo car. The following photos and a video show the user implementing this connection for control of police cruiser lights and siren. Future work will be focused on making the interface hands free with voice recognition on the PDA.

The Arduino Wireless server inside the demo Police Cruiser

The Login Screen for the Wireless Interface Application

The Control Screen for the Wireless Interface Application

Using the Wireless Interface Application to control the front and rear strobes on the demo Police Cruiser

Wireless Control of the Light Bar on a demo Police Cruiser with a Motorola PDA

Continue reading »]]> I am Ivan Razumenić, an Electrical Engineering senior exchange student from Serbia. After the eventful first semester at UNH and ECE department, and halfway through the exchange program, I would like to share my experience and hopefully motivate some of you for study abroad programs.

I will briefly talk about academic, student life, and cultural aspects of the exchange program that affected me. For a more detailed view I have on benefits of living in country other than your own, please take a look at a story called String theory on my personal blog.

After gaining mostly theoretical knowledge at the University of Belgrade (Serbia) I compensated the lack of practical work by taking several open lab courses in the previous semester. Even though I already got specialized in Control Systems and Signal Processing, it was good to go back to amplifiers, filters, integrated circuits, and see all the theory being applied. Icing on the cake was an ECE 775 final project I did. The goal was to make a communication link between a base station and a toy train through the tracks. The same link is used to power supply the train. If you are interested, you can see a project presentation on the following page.

Probably the most important part of my work at UNH is my internship at Project54. Being involved in a research on a graduate level, and the experience I have in this lab will have a big impact on my future academic goals. The goal of the research is to estimate the driver’s cognitive load by analyzing the size of his/her pupil. The topic and the methods used are covered by my expertize (not implicating I am an expert ) and I enjoy working on this project. Details could be found on the following page.

What make the academic work I talked about difficult are all the extracurricular activities available to a student at UNH. The concept of campus is foreign in most of the Europe, and the concentration of opportunities is something that fascinated me from the first day I came to US. As I come from the sport nation (the same day I am writing this Serbian water polo team, handball team and tennis player Novak Đoković all qualified to the finals on the tournaments they compete at) it is not strange I am competitive in many sports. Among other things, I started playing soccer again, I become a part of the UNH archery team and I discovered the excitement of surfing!

And I must say, what a big country you have! I took a word break very seriously and I traveled across U.S. during winter break. Even though U.S. population is mixed, the the lack of geographical diversity surprised me. The trip made me realize how different from each other European countries are.

Exchange program usually works both ways, but unless you speak Serbian you could not study in Serbia [for now]. As compensation, I would like to present to you Petnica Science Center. It is the largest research center for high school students in Europe, but every summer a two-weeks high quality international seminar for college students happens. I sincerely recommend you to apply for the Petnica International program, and I would be happy to welcome you in Serbia.

Being in U.S. and UNH is, in many aspects, very rich experience for me and I am happy to be here for one more semester. See you somewhere in the class.

Continue reading »]]> The project we are working on is a virtual air-hockey game for the Microsoft Surface that utilizes an accelerometer mounted on an arduino to provide easy/realistic control.
For more information about our project check out this post:
Games for the Microsoft Surface

Here 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.

-Shawn Bryan & Josh Clairmont

Continue reading »]]> 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.

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:

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!

Continue reading »]]> 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.

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.

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.

Now this data is graphed using Excel.

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.

Continue reading »]]> 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.

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!

Continue reading »]]> 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 18^th 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

Continue reading »]]> 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

Continue reading »]]> 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

Continue reading »]]> 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.