Human Computer Interaction (HCI), Virtual and Augmented Reality, Wearable Technologies

Human-computer interaction (HCI) is an interdisciplinary area concerned with the design, implementation, and evaluation of interactive computing systems. Researchers in HCI come from a number of disciplines, including computer science, engineering, design, human factor, and social science, with a shared goal to solve problems in the design and the use of technology so that it can be used more easily, effectively, efficiently, safely, and with satisfaction. Our faculty in HCI have focused on Novel and Tangible Interaction, Virtual/Augmented Reality, Context-Aware Computing, Activity and Pattern Recognition, Smart Environment, Crowdsourcing, and Human Computation, Mobile and Wearable devices, Intelligent agent, and Persuasive Computing.

On the other hand, "Virtual/Augmented Reality" technologies, which are based on computer vision and computer graphics technologies, can visually simulate/demonstrate seemingly real interactions between environment and synthetic/real objects before real interactions, e.g., contacts, taking place. Therefore, users can determine in advance the quality of interaction conditions and possible effects of the real interactions more intuitively.

Finally, with the introduction of "wearable" devices, HCI can be significantly enhanced with improvements in (i) the availability of a variety of personal information (such as brain waves, blood pressure, etc), (ii) the stability in analyzing related information (since more robust signal/image features can be obtained), and (iii) its operation range (since user movement is less constrained).

To achieve the best effect of a specific HCI, related intelligent computation can be performed, in part or as a whole, by front-end devices, back-end facilities, or via cloud computing, depending on computational complexity and other constraints in operation space/time.

Research Themes

• Human-Computer Interface
• Computer Vision and Image Processing
• Virtual/Augmented Reality (VR/AR)
• Wearable Sensing
• Immersive Display/Output
• 3D/Video-based HCI Applications
• Robotics

Research Team