First Semester Done

Photo from our last hackathon in December, showing a number of students involved in the lab, picture taken with Kinect Photo

Fall 2016 was our first semester at UMSI, and a number of things happened:

• set up our new lab space
• purchased an initial set of wearable, mobile, and stationary devices: five 4K displays, a number of smartwatches, mobile phones, Kinects, portable projector, Surface Book and Surface Studio (pre-order)
• got our lab’s logo designed
• primarily worked on interfaces to support our lab activities, but also initial research

Our projects included:

• lab backend and platform that manages devices and users in the lab
• lab dashboard, an ambient interface pulling together information on all kinds of lab activities
• Slack and Trello integrations
• Alexa voice interfaces for the lab
• Kinect gesture, voice and multimodal interfaces for the lab based on Kinect Analysis
• sketching and note-taking interfaces
• continued our research on the XDBrowser project:
  • support for semi-automatic distribution (upcoming CHI’17 paper)
  • round smartwatch interface
  • projector-based interface
  • in-car interface

Other activities included:

• presented research overview at MISC seminar
• taught SI 482 Interaction Design Studio
• organized weekly hackathons for interested students
• held cross-device tutorial at the International Conference on Surfaces and Space (ISS’16)