This page lists project proposals for Masters or Bachelor level students (the complexity of most projects can be adjusted). It also lists ongoing and past projects for reference. If you are interested drop me an email to set up a meeting or add me on skype.
I encourage to release projects as open source and document progress online.
with Andrea Pacino, (project blog)
Design, build, implement and evaluate different pens for tabletops. The goal of this project is to test different pens designs (e.g. with button, accelerometer, tilt or pressure sensors...) and measure which design is more efficient for different types of interaction, e.g., dragging an icon on a large display, writing text, making gestures...
with Leo Sicard, (project blog)
This project investigates the use of tabletops exclusively as UI peripherals for other computing devices, as opposed to considering them as standalone computers. We are exploring device composition with mobile devices focusing on seamless interaction and integration.
We consider different types of UI integration:
This project includes reviewing current research in the field of tabletop interaction, designing and implementing a prototype application, as well as evaluating it by way of a usability study.
This work is based on the PhoneVortex, developed by PhD student (and co-supervisor) Juan David Hincapié Ramos.
You can read the full project description here.
Keywords: Field studies, Video processing.
Most tabletop applications assume that the whole tabletop will be free of objects and the whole screen real estate available for display. Yet with their horizontal surfaces, tabletops afford objects laying on them as we could notice in the eLabBench project.
There are plenty of projects augmenting or integrating physical objects on tabletops. The idea here is rather to define the types and properties of objects that shouldn't be augmented (e.g. a sandwich on a meeting table). This qualitative and quantitative information would be useful for the next step: designing mechanisms to handle occlusion such as this project from Purdue Univ.
This projects aims at studying how people are currently using tables or desks, and analyzing data from existing tabletop applications (mainly from the eLabBench) to better understand the types of objects laying on them.
more to come...
This project is a follow up to the NoxDroid project
Details are not public but it's a really cool an straightforward project involving some simple electronics.
Email me to know more!
This project will most probably be in collaboration with Juan-David Hincapié Ramos, soon to be at University of Manitoba
Keywords: Programming, Framework, Embedded computing, Design.
Many "smart" or programmable watches are currently reaching the market, but they are often cumbersome to program and require extensive JAVA or C knowledge.
List of watch candidates: inpulse, Texas Instruments EZ430 Chronos (get) metawatch, LiveView, dynawatch.
An extra set of things would be to provide easy to use machine learning or gesture recognition mechanisms.
The goal of this project is to build an toolkit that designers could use to develop applications for watches. The toolkit should provide access to the watch functionalities (sensor data, display) in a designer friendly environment (Flash, Processing, Max/MSP or others).
Keywords: Visualization, Desktop computing, Interaction techniques.
Why does the Desktop on your computer has this fixed size?
This project aims at improving the traditional wallpaper+icons desktop. The new desktop should provide more space (potentially infinitely more) to organize icons, and be navigable.
Combine a laptop and a tabletop into one continuous interface, where users can move documents and windows between the screen of the computer and the horizontal surface of their desk.
There has been quite some research on device composition and laptop/tabletop integration in smart rooms. The idea of this project is to focus on a single user scenario for tabletop that fits the practices of knowledge workers.
Some references: Bonfire (video), Magic Desk (paper, video), Multi-touch Table as Conventional Input Device.
Keywords: Physical computing. Tools: conductive ink, thermochromic inks, Arduino.
Wouldn't it be cool if tattoos, nail polish or any sort other of body modification were dynamic, react to their environment or even be interactive?
This project is pretty open ended and definitely fun.
Today email is heavily used to share tasks and to-do actions between people. These to-do actions are managed within email clients, calendar applications or dedicated to-do list applications. Yet there is no way to centralize tasks coming from different tools (email, trac, personal to-do manager...) and share the status of tasks. So private applications e.g. Outlook+sharepoint can handle shared to-do list but they do not offer interoperability with other clients or platforms.
The goal of this project is to build an open protocol, similar to what IMAP/SMTP is for email, that can be used to centralize and share tasks, their statuses and their participants.
Projects can also be followed up or improved, if you find any of these interesting bring that up.
with Andreas Bok Andersen, Pelle Krøgholt and Stine Bierre
This project became NoxDroid.org (paper, poster).