The Center for Human Computer Interaction

The department has created an outstanding faculty in human-computer interaction. A successful "research infrastructure" (RI) award from NSF in the mid-1990s allowed the construction of specialized laboratories for HCI research. The department's commitment to this endeavor was reflected in faculty hiring so that he HCI group now consists of eight core faculty and twelve other affiliated faculty, research scientists, emeritus faculty, or research faculty. Laboratory facilities for conducting HCI research are contained in the Center for Human-Computer Interaction located in VT-KnowledgeworksII in the Corporate Research Center.  The HCI group has found good synergy in the "gigapixel display" project that has received initial funding from NSF. The HCI group is also the point of contact between the department and the arts and humanities. The department is collaborating on a "cyberarts" program in conjunction with departments in the College of Architecture and the College of Liberal Arts and Human Sciences.

 

3D Interaction Group

URL: http://research.cs.vt.edu/3di/index.html
Contact: Doug Bowman

3DI stands for "three-dimensional interaction". Our research spans 3D user interfaces, interaction techniques, and applications, especially in the area of Virtual Environments (VE). Interaction in three dimensions is not well-understood, but is crucial to highly interactive VE applications like immersive education, scientific visualization, and immersive design. The mission of our lab is to perform both basic and applied research in three-dimensional (3D) interaction and VE technology, and to develop applications of VEs in a wide variety of domains.

Animation and Gaming Research Lab

Contact: Yong Cao

Design of Interactive Systems Studio

Contact: Steve Harrison

Gigapixel Display Laboratory

URL: http://infovis.cs.vt.edu/gigapixel/
Contact: Chris North

 The GigaPixel Display Laboratory is hosted by Virginia Tech's Department of Computer Science and the Center for Human-Computer Interaction (CHCI).  This NSF-funded facility contains reconfigurable ultra-high resolution displays, totaling approximately 200 million pixels, one of the highest resolutions in the world.

Laboratory for Information Visualization and Evaluation

URL: http://infovis.cs.vt.edu/
Contact: Chris North

 The LIVE lab studies the design, development, and evaluation of information visualizations.  Information visualizations are interactive visual representation of abstract data that enable people to effectively explore and understand large quantities of complex information.

Personal Information Management Lab

URL: http://perez.cs.vt.edu/pim
Contact: Manuel Pérez-Quiñones

The PIM lab studies how individuals use technology to organize and use  their day to day information needs. The goal is to explore how to best  make use of our limited personal resources (time, money, energy,  attention) to improve the quality of our lives. This often translate  to better productivity but can simply mean more satisfaction. An area  of interest is how advances in PIM research could informs education  programs that focus on information literacy. We are particularly  interested in how people use many devices in their day to day  activities. To support that, we have available for research desktops,  laptops, web servers, large displays, iPods, PDAs, RFIDs, phone system  with support for VoiceXML, and many other technologies.

Pragmatics of Educational/Emotional Computing (POET) Research Lab

Contact: Deborah Tatar

The POET lab engages in research of real-world technology projects that promote equity and excellence in K-12 math and science classrooms and university engineering education, explores systems (especially Tuple Space-based) to support complex human coordination, lies in the realms of computer-supported cooperative work (CSCW) and computer-supported cooperative learning (CSCL), evaluates handheld, tablet, and large-screen computing, and contributes to the issues of social attention and technology.

Social Computing Lab

URL: http://java.cs.vt.edu/public/chci/site/socialcomputing.html
Contact: Andrea Kavanaugh

Social computing is the study of the social use and impact of information technology, and the study of information technology designed specifically for social purposes, such as interpersonal and group communication, discussion, and social interaction (e.g., electronic mail, instant messenger, discussion tools, blogging, and social websites, such as Friendster, Facebook, and MySpace). It draws on multiple disciplines, including sociology, social psychology, political science, communication studies, and computer science.

Vision Interfaces and Systems Laboratory

URL: http://vislab.cs.vt.edu/
Contact: Francis Quek

The Vision Interfaces and Systems Laboratory is engaged in research along three themes: advanced human computer interaction, computer vision, and medical imaging. Ongoing projects in VISLab are: multimodal human-computer interaction, multimodal meeting analysis of planning meetings, conversational interaction, vision-based hand gesture interaction; vision-based gaze tracking, multimedia databases; automated segmentation of video; registration of aerial video/photography from Unmanned Aerial Vehicles, extraction of the neurovascular tree from multimodal medical images; and, three-dimensional alignment of multimodal medical images. The fundamental vision of the VISLab is that Computer Science and Engineering, in general, and HCI and Computer Vision, in particular, have an important role to play in a vast array of arts and sciences. Most of the research in the VISLab is collaborative with other fields. In return, the real challenges of these real projects enrich and focus our research.

Visual Computing Lab

URL: http://www.arc.vt.edu
Contact: Nicholas Polys