Blog

UPDATE: The available positions have been filled for Winter 2020. We will consider new applicants for Fall 2020, and will reach out to students in August 2020.

The Michigan Information Interaction Lab is looking to fill up to three new positions for master’s students from across U-M (please apply by filling in this form). Ideally, applicants have taken some of Professor Nebeling‘s AR/VR courses, SI 559 and/or SI 659, and significant experience with methods and tools in the desired areas:

• AR/VR web developer: Help develop a set of web-based AR/VR tools that were previously published and that are now becoming part of a larger AR/VR online creation platform. The platform will be used to support a new AR/VR MOOC specialization on Coursera currently being designed and produced by Professor Nebeling with the Center for Academic Innovation. Significant experience with JavaScript is required. Experience with A-Frame and Unity is a plus.
• AR/VR Unity developer: Help create a set of novel AR/VR experiences that make use of a variety of input and output technologies. Significant experience with Unity is required. Experience with 3D animation and modeling tools is a plus.
• AR/VR designer: Help create interactive 3D content for a variety of new AR/VR experiences that will be created next year as part of Professor Nebeling’s research and his efforts to support the U-M wide XR Initiative. Significant experience with 3D modeling and animation tools required. Experience with UX practices and AR/VR design methods is a plus.

Positions are paid research assistant positions — while there is an expected workload of 6-10 hours per week, there will not always be an equal amount of work every week, and students will contribute to multiple projects based on their skills, rather than being assigned to one semester-long project. There will be a short interview process, and possibly a short trial period, to make sure that candidates are a fit and have the required skills. Positions may also be taken up for credit in the form of independent study.

While we are an ambitious research group, we are also a fun team of students and faculty interested in experimenting with up-and-coming AR/VR technologies. Feel free to reach out to current or previous students working in the lab to learn about their experience.

IMPORTANT: Please apply by filling in this form. Don’t just send emails to express your interest; I will not be able to respond to them. We will review the applications entered via the form and get back to you after initial review in early January 2020. Thank you for your interest!

Professor Nebeling and members of the Information Interaction Lab are excited to share that they have been recognized as a key partner in U-M’s new major XR Initiative, which was recently announced by the Provost and endorsed by the President.

While the specifics and strategic goals are still in development, one of the most exciting first milestones for us in the lab will be a new set of online courses that will provide significant training in design and development of AR/VR technologies, together with frameworks for ethical, social, privacy, and security aware design of AR/VR apps, as well as guidelines and recommendations for creating new AR/VR spaces for research and development as well as teaching and learning, which will be particularly helpful for resource constrained environments such as many libraries and schools. These new learning materials will significantly expand on Professor Nebeling’s AR/VR/MR Teach-Out on Coursera, which has provided an introduction to AR/VR technologies to more than 2,400 active learners world-wide.

We have also started new collaborations with several key vendors in the AR/VR space.

We are so excited by the enthusiastic support and the new movements at U-M! If you are interested in supporting our efforts, please reach out to Professor Nebeling at nebeling@umich.edu.

UPDATE: We have received more than 30 applications from students interested in joining the research of Professor Michael Nebeling and his team. We’re very excited by that. Thank you! We will internally review applications and start contacting shortlisted candidates after January 9th, 2020. It is our hope that final decisions are made and can be communicated by the end of January.

The Michigan Information Interaction Lab will have several open positions in 2020 at different levels. People joining in these positions will work directly with me (Michael Nebeling):

• 1-2 PhD student positions: If you’re thinking about doing a PhD and applying to UMSI or CSE at Michigan (I can supervise in both, and am happy to co-supervise with other professors in either department, in fact, I consider many close colleagues and friends!), with broadly defined interests in mixed reality (any angle really, UX/interaction design, arts, computer graphics, ML, robotics are all fascinating to me!), definitely get in touch! Don’t just apply, and don’t just consider UMSI or CSE (they are both great, but also quite different, so you may increase your chances of finding the right spot for you at U-M by applying to both). I’m happy to chat with you before your application and share my experience.
• 1 postdoc position: I originally posted about this here. I did my postdoc at CMU and it was one of the best parts of my academic career. U-M has great resources and UMSI (my home department) is so inter-disciplinary, it’s really eye-opening. If you want to push yourself after your PhD to work on your next career steps, be it in academia or industry, I would really like to meet you!
• 1 visiting PhD researcher position: The next step after the PhD can be a critical career decision, and I have personally experienced this and know too well how difficult it is to make that decision. I would like to offer a 6-12 months funded research stay in my lab, with possibility of conversion into a postdoc, if it works for both you and me. U-M is great, you should definitely consider it!
• Presidential Postdocs: We also have the presidential postdoc fellowship program, which means you could end up in a position that will be converted to a tenure-track assistant professor after 1-2 years. Applications are now open (until October 15, 2019).

For any of the positions above, don’t just apply. Reach out to me and express your interest first, so I can guide you through the process. Please include a short statement of interest and a CV, if you can.

I look forward to hearing from you!

As announced earlier, several members of the Information Interaction Lab attended CHI 2019 in Glasgow, Scotland, UK. This week, the video recordings of our presentations were released:

1. 360proto: Making Interactive Virtual Reality / Augmented Reality Prototypes from Paper
Michael Nebeling, Katy Madier

2. What is Mixed Reality?
Maximilian Speicher, Brian D. Hall, Michael Nebeling

The Michigan Information Interaction Lab directed by Professor Michael Nebeling is looking for 1-2 postdocs to join their efforts in designing and studying new interactive systems & technologies.

Over the first three years at U-M, the lab has worked at the forefront of cross-device interfaces, multi-modal interaction, and AR/VR. Our systems research contributions include ProtoAR [CHI’18] and 360proto [CHI’19] for rapid prototyping of AR/VR interfaces using cross-device authoring, 360Anywhere [EICS’18] for 360 video based collaboration using mixed reality, GestureWiz [CHI’18] for using Wizard of Oz and crowdsourcing in gesture design and recognition tasks. Using the knowledge from building these systems, the lab has also been working on conceptual frameworks and new ways of thinking about future interfaces’ design through contributions such as What is Mixed Reality? [CHI’19 Best Paper Honorable Mention], The Trouble with AR/VR Authoring Tools [ISMAR’18 Adj.], Playing the Tricky Game of Toolkits Research [CHI’17 HCI.Tools Workshop], and studies on creating cross-device AR experiences resulting in XD-AR [EICS’18 Best Paper Award] as well as user-driven design principles for gesture representations [CHI’18].

We’re considering applications of successful PhDs (defended by the start date) who have been active in premier HCI conferences, notably CHI, UIST, and CSCW, but also related, more specialized conferences such as IMWUT (formerly UbiComp), ISS (formerly ITS), EICS, TEI, SUI, ISMAR, VR, and VRST.

As a new post-doctoral research fellow in the lab, you would closely work with Michael and his students to help develop and lead new research projects on novel interactive technologies and interactive systems. We currently focus our research on designing, developing, and evaluating novel AR/VR experiences. But we’re always interested in broadening our research activities as well.

Interested applicants should get in touch with Michael directly via email (nebeling@umich.edu).

We are excited to announce our CHI 2019 AR/VR prototyping course. The course web site can be found here.

AR/VR technologies are starting to disrupt our everyday experiences and they are playing an increasingly important role in interaction design. The course taught by Professor Nebeling will introduce CHI 2019 attendees to state-of-the-art AR/VR prototyping methods and tools including ProtoAR, which we recently presented at CHI 2018 and are currently preparing for public release.

The course will be very hands-on introducing participants to both physical prototyping and digital prototyping techniques. These techniques allow designers to rapidly create and try out AR/VR interface designs in order to make decisions on how to best take a particular design concept further, or to abandon it early before putting in all the effort that is currently required to program these interfaces.

Join us to learn more about ways of incorporating AR/VR design activities into existing courses, workshops, and student design jams!

Find out more about the course here

We are really excited to receive a Mozilla Research Grant for our research on AR/VR.

The research gift from Mozilla will enable Professor Nebeling and his lab to conduct two important research studies around the future of the web and its use as a platform for augmented reality applications. The first study will explore a range of desirable augmented reality applications and how they could be created by composing popular, existing applications in interesting and useful, new ways. The second study will focus on new interactions techniques and technical solutions for sharing links to and content of web applications based on novel augmented reality interfaces. Together, these studies will inform the design of future web browsing interfaces and technologies with user-driven support for AR/VR.

We are very happy that Mozilla is supporting the research in the lab, and the support will allow us to bring on several new MSI students, many of which Professor Nebeling has been teaching in his new AR/VR course, and who are now excited to get to work on this project to practice the techniques they studied and deepen their research skills.

Mozilla selected us because they believe in the work we do and in the impact it can have on the web for AR/VR. While many vendors try to shape the future of AR/VR in terms of their specific platforms and technologies, the web needs to remain the open access and device-agnostic platform that it is. This is very important to Mozilla, and to us, and requires new research like ours.