Blog

We’re happy to announce that Joshua Guberman will enter the UMSI PhD program in Fall 2018, and will be working in the Information Interaction Lab as a research assistant. He will be advised by Michael Nebeling and Sile O’Modhrain.

Josh describes himself as a social-sciences researcher, a tinkerer/inventor, and a UI/UX enthusiast. He is a recent Illinois Tech graduate with a B.S. in Psychology. Josh is very passionate about accessibility and will help the lab explore new research avenues with accessibility as an important application domain. We’re excited about this, and look forward to him joining our lab and the UMSI community!

We’re happy to welcome Rob Rumble as a PhD student in the Information Interaction Lab starting in Fall 2018. He will be advised by Michael Nebeling and Steve Oney.

Rob has already been working in the lab since Summer 2017, then joined the MSI program as a master’s student, and was recently accepted into the UMSI PhD program. This is an exciting switch and will allow Rob to spend more time on research.

Rob’s interests are in AR/VR. Over the last two semesters as a research assistant in the lab, he has worked on several smartphone-based AR projects, including ProtoAR which we will present at CHI 2018, and has also been exploring the potential of VR, and the ability to switch between AR and VR in an independent study project. We’re glad to have him as a PhD student in our lab!

We’re happy to announce that a new set of courses focused on AR/VR will be offered starting in the Fall 2018 semester. These and other courses we are teaching can also be found under Teaching.

First, there is an Intro to AR/VR (SI 559). We are currently working hard to make it accessible to the entire community at Michigan. While there is a number of students on the wait list, we will have to start small in the Fall semester. Based on this experience, our plan is to scale the course to larger student groups and perhaps multiple sections.

Second, there will be an Advanced AR/VR course. This course is targeted at more technical students interested in diving deeper into AR/VR interface development and content creation. Importantly, the Intro course is not a prerequisite for this course, though it is recommended. Prerequisites are SI 506 and SI 539, or similar courses, to make sure that students have a background in programming. Ideally, students would have experience with Three.js/A-Frame/JavaScript or Unity/C#.

Both courses will be taught by Professor Nebeling and will be supported by members of the Information Interaction Lab. We are working hard with various partners from industry, ranging from prototyping tool developers, to device manufacturers, to content providers. It will be a very exciting experience for us, and we hope you will be able to join us on this journey!

Michael Nebeling and colleagues from U-M’s School of Information and the STAMPS School of Art and Design have put together a U-M Teach-Out on Augmented, Virtual, and Mixed Reality. The teach-out will be delivered in the form of an open-enrollment course on Coursera for free titled Augmented Reality, Virtual Reality, and Mixed Reality: Opportunities and Issues.

We had a lot of fun creating this course and we hope you will be able to join us and participate in the discussion forums!

We are happy to announce that the Information Interaction Lab was selected as one of a few university labs to participate in two virtual reality (VR) pilot programs around Google Daydream and their Jump camera. These are two main VR initiatives by Google and we are happy to support them.

Daydream is a smartphone display wrapper with a tracked controller (like a wand) that turn an existing smartphone into a fully immersive headset. We already use Daydream in several of our research projects and so we are glad to participate in a broader pilot program to bring these technologies to campus and into classrooms.

What is of course also very exciting for the lab is that we have been selected as participants in Google Jump’s loan program. This is a highly sophisticated and expensive piece of equipment that we will install in the lab and use in various ongoing projects around AR/VR usability. Our current plan is to make use of this equipment specifically in a funded 12-week summer research position in our lab.

The University of Michigan School of Information is hosting a 12-week intensive summer Research Experience for Master’s Students (REMS) from other iSchool master’s programs, schools of library and information science, or related programs, May 29–August 17, 2018.

Our lab is offering a project on AR/VR Usability Testing. You will work with UMSI professor Michael Nebeling in the Information Interaction Lab where we are investigating how multiple different types of devices can be combined and used in interesting ways to provide new interaction possibilities and enable tasks that are difficult to do using any of the devices alone. The project will focus on translating traditional methods and principles from user study design and usability testing to AR/VR usability. Depending on your interests, you could help with the development of new tools to support such studies, the design and evaluation of new kinds of AR/VR interfaces with a particular focus on usability testing, or both.

We hosted a REMS student last year. It was a very successful project and experience for both the student and the lab, which also resulted in a paper that will be presented by the student at CHI 2018.

Please check out more information on the REMS program and the AR/VR Usability Testing project. For project related questions, feel free to get in touch with Professor Nebeling directly.

We are delighted to announce that we have received two new grants from Masco and Ford. The School of Information put together a short article about the Masco project. In both projects, we will work with teams from these companies on new kinds of AR/VR interfaces. Both projects will help us explore a wider range of applications for our ongoing AR/VR research.

We are happy to announce that we have three conditionally accepted papers at CHI 2018 featuring our work on ProtoAR, a new AR physical-to-digital prototyping tool, GestureWiz, a gesture interface prototyping tool, and one paper on two studies into user-driven gesture representations.

1. ProtoAR: Rapid Physical-Digital Prototyping of Mobile Augmented Reality Applications 
   M. Nebeling, J. Nebeling, A. Yu, R. Rumble
2. GestureWiz: A Human-Powered Gesture Design Environment for User Interface Prototypes
   M. Speicher, M. Nebeling
3. User-Driven Design Principles for Gesture Representations
   E. McAweeney, H. Zhang, M. Nebeling

See you at CHI 2018 in Montreal!

The Information Interaction Lab at the University of Michigan School of Information has the following openings for Postdocs and PhD students:

• one opening for a Postdoc (ideally, with a strong publication record in premier HCI conferences and experience with AR/VR technologies) starting 2018
• between one and two openings for PhD students (with experience in interactive systems and devices including, but not limited to, AR/VR technologies) starting Fall 2018 (applications are due 1 December 2017).

Our lab is a rapidly growing group of talented researchers and students working on a mission to create and study next-generation user interfaces that make it easier to work with information and technology in more natural and powerful ways. We are working to push the state of the art in interface software and technologies, most recently focused on AR/VR, but also including voice-based assistants like Alexa, wearable devices such as smartwatches, and cross-device interfaces.

Be sure to check out our research page. You can find more information on how to apply on the Jobs & Internships page.