Throughout the semester, Ivan Elhart, Michael Farrar, and myself, have developed a handheld-display
projection application, allowing users to transfer the handheld displays’ contents to an
alternative viewing platform. We have recorded several scenarios demonstrating the
system and would like your feedback. In each video, an image of the handheld
displays’ contents will be shown in the lower-right corner of the frame.

Click here to help us and take the survey.

Have a good one,

Nemanja Memarovic

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!

What do you think about all this? How does engineering education at the undergraduate or graduate level strike you? Just right? Boring? Engaging? Any ideas on how to make it better?

Andrew Kun

Overall we had a great time learning new ideas and sharing a few of our own. We definitely look forward to next year!!

2008 NECHFES University of New Hampshire Presentation Group.

Last week, a group of us from the lab had traveled to Boston’s Northeastern University, attending the NECHFES student conference.  It was my first conference experience and I do have to say that it surpassed my expectations.  The atmosphere was very relaxed, and presentations were nicely sequenced with 10 – 15 minute breaks.  Of course, breakfast and lunch were served, both of which were outstanding, and free!  The keynote speaker, Daniel Serfaty from Aptima Inc, had some unique perspectives on the ubiquitous computing world of today, and tomorrow, very interesting!  Photos of my speech, entitle “Using voice to tag digital photographs on the spot” can be found here, and the complete presentation here.  I look forward to attending similar events.

Michael Farrar

Thanks,

Alexander Shyrokov

Fortunately, Albert Pelhe, a good friend of mine, informed me about a workaround to this problem. DigiDNA came up with DiskAid, an application that lets the user copy files to and from the iPhone and iPod Touch. It is freeware and claims to have 0% of adware, spyware and virus content. The only inconvenience is that it must be installed on every computer where the device is meant to be used as a removable disk drive.

If anyone from Apple reads this blog I have a request for them: please let information flow freely. You can try to control it, but you will become unpopular in the realm of techies. Thanks,

Oszkar

So far we have heard very interesting driving simulator talks from NEU students. Hui Cai presented his results on estimating driver emotional state using various physical measurements (heart rate variability, skin conductance, etc.)

After him, Z. Yin presented his study on driving simulator sickness. He has found that, optical flow affects largely this type of motion sickness.

That’s all for now. We will have more posts about today’s very interesting conference.

Oszkar

Since GIS Day is an event geared towards elementary and high school students, Wake urged the millennium generation to talk to their parents about climate change and to educate themselves on the topic. His lectures are always very interesting with fascinating, eye-opening graphs.

The image above shows the increase in the amount of CO2 in Earth’s atmosphere in the last 50 years. All significant scientific research shows that today’s climate change is largely influenced by humans. At the end of the lecture I asked professor Wake what could be the motivation of those people who do not want to accept climate change to be caused by man, against all the scientific results. He answered, that those people might have ideological reasons for doing so, since all research data shows otherwise.

Oszkar

Andrew Kun