Boriana Koleva's Project Ideas:
My research area is the field of Human Computer Interaction with a particular emphasis on mixed reality interfaces. In general I am happy to supervise any projects with an HCI and/or novel interface component.
Some ideas for projects I would be interested in supervising:
Hybrid Gifts
The project will explore novel forms of hybrid gifts, which
flexibly combine physical artefacts with digital media to deliver powerful
gifting experiences. In particular, the opportunities of AR and VR technologies
can be investigated to interleave the physical and the digital to create hybrid
gifts that are valued by receivers.
Using mobile devices (mobile phones or tablets) and positioning technologies (e.g. GPS) to create applications such as:
- Mobile guides for cities and museum environments
- Mobile learning
- Combining mobile devices with embedded computers (e.g. using a mobile phone to reveal content on a surface or using a mobile phone as an input device to browse content on a large shared display
- Mobile gaming
- Storytelling on/with mobile devices
These are interfaces which exploit physical-world modalities of interaction; the user usually interacts with the computer by manipulating physical objects. Such interfaces can be easily constructed with the Phidgets toolkit. This includes 2 Touch Sensors, 2 Force Sensors , 2 Slider Sensors, 2 Light Sensors, 1 Dual Axis Accelerometer, Coloured LEDs, Pushbuttons, 4 servo motors and a USB RFID reader (+ USB board for connecting all these input and output components to the computer). For more information on the Phidgets toolkit see http://www.phidgets.com/ and for examples of projects see http://www.cpsc.ucalgary.ca/grouplab/phidgets/gallery/index.html.