Benjamin Watson

This project will develop adaptive rendering and display technologies supporting emerging immersive displays, including wall-spanning, glasses-free stereo windows and lightweight AR/VR glasses. Such displays demand high-bandwidth, low-latency input not available today. We will attack this problem with software and hardware that exploit perceptual asymmetries and spatiotemporal redundancies. The resulting immersive displays will help realize nascent applications such as immersive entertainment and simulation, socially engaging conferencing and first-person wayfinding.

LAS DO1 Watson - 2.1 Human-Machine Collaboration

This course project will investigate two applications of augmented reality to Caterpillar vehicles: an augmented dashboard that can flexibly change appearance to suit current needs, and a transparent bucket that lets operators see through it, to improve safety and productivity.

In December 2017 Caterpillar will enter the Utility Vehicle (UTV) Market with the CUV range of open cab, off road vehicles. There are already several competitors in the market, initial evaluations indicate that there are opportunities in the areas of quality, ergonomics, features, aesthetics and comfort. This project is to develop UX delighters in the cab especially around the display, based on the CUV platform. Solutions should offer a competitive advantage, technology or differentiation that can disrupt the market and position Caterpillar������������������s UTV as the best in class.

Analyze the data and video provided by Caterpillar to develop possible measures of user experience such as frustration, engagement, or flow; compare results to the survey results University collects as part of the funded project. Surveys will ideally be well-established instruments in the public domain, or custom built for the project. If necessary, surveys may be licensed by the University, as long as they do not restrict use of the resulting data. The University will provide Caterpillar with the results of this comparison.

RECOGNIZE is a visual quiz game, with a mechanic much like the TV game show ����������������Name That Tune.��������������� Rather than naming a snippet of music, players match a slowly revealed ����������������source��������������� image (e.g., a picture of the artist Salvador Dali) to one of several ����������������target��������������� images (a different picture of Dali, as well as several other artists). RECOGNIZE is unique in its fully visual quizzing mechanic, with both questions and answers posed visually. This project will further develop RECOGNIZE into a viable commercial product with a broad range of educational applications, including individual instruction, group exercises, and distance learning.

Digital technology now permeates our lives. We use it to work, play, and relate; from the moment our eyes open until they close. It is nothing less than a technical and societal revolution, one that has already reached the academy: in art, design, humanities, social sciences, psychology, geosciences, education and marketing, faculty are already studying technology's impact. How do we shape our technology, and how does it shape us? How do we relate to technology, not only rationally but also emotionally? Recently, the discipline of "user experience" (UX) has emerged as the focus for work addressing questions such as these. Yet although this discipline is a central focus at leading companies such as Apple, Google and even IBM, we cannot find one major US university with a user experience degree program. We believe this represents a major opportunity, and that NC State is very well poised to seize it. In the next couple months, we will organize a small informal meeting for core members of the NCSU and corporate UX community, at which we will identify the funding, research and teaching opportunities we would like to pursue. Early next year, we will organize a larger workshop titled ITX: Interactive Technology Experience, designed to further shape our plans while also announcing our presence to the public.

Digital technology is now integrating itself deeply into our daily lives, blurring the boundary between engineering and design. The evidence of this synthesis is all around us: computer games, digital film, mobile phones and more. It is nothing less than a technical and societal revolution. How striking then, that there are so few graduate programs that train future researchers to work in an environment that values both design and technology! Our IGERT proposal would fund Design/Tech NC (DTNC), which will bring computer scientists and designers together to research this emerging domain. They will address these challenges in a new graduate certificate program, comprised of two pillars: summer design intensives, and interdisciplinary, long-term doctoral projects. A successful SRI proposal would let us pilot the design intensive in summer of this year. Participants will work closely for eight weeks on design/technology problems contributed by corporate partners. They will produce an iPhone app that as polished as possible, learn ideation, evaluation and rapid prototyping technique, with the regular guideance of corporate partners such as IBM and Allscripts.

This proposal describes an NSF Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU) program. The NSF REU program supports active research participation by undergraduate students in any of the areas of research funded by the National Science Foundation. REU projects involve students in meaningful ways in ongoing research programs or in research projects designed especially for the purpose. We will include PIs and senior participants from the areas of computer graphics, scientific visualization, artificial intelligence, and design. Our potential research projects revolve around two basic threads. First, we will work with students to help then investigate "interaction" in virtual worlds. This will include topics like navigation aids, in particular ways to automatically and dynamically infer a user's interests via preference ellicitation, then build graph-based paths through the world, and offer the user ways to use these paths to automatically tour through interesting regions. Another project involves having agents explore the world by "uncovering" spatial regions around the agent, causing them to appear and be visualized. A third project studies how to allow human and computer actors to interact in a virtual world, yet ensure they follow an underlying storyline to direct their narrative, explorations, and discoveries. A second basic research area deals with presenting large images. One project investigates the limits of human perception, and tries to determine, given a particular viewing environment how can we maximize the amount of information we can convey to the viewer, and how can we dynamically change the way we represent information when conditions change. Another project explores the use of non-traditional display devices (e.g., large format projection walls) to present large images. Students will be selected from a list of applicants, and will visit the university during the summer for 12 weeks. They will be provided with on-campus housing, a weekly stipend for meals and other expenses, and full access to our research facilities and expertise. The goal is to introduce these students to our different research projects, and to encourage them to continue on with postgraduate study in Computer Science.

Drastic improvements in the speed of 3D graphics rendering hardware have been accompanied by even more drastic increases in the size of displayed models. Researchers trying to display these models have been forced either to reduce display speed and interactivity, or instead to reduce the fidelity of the displayed views of their models. What are the best methods for preserving visual fidelity as model complexity is automatically reduced or ?simplified?? What is the most effective way of striking the display speed vs. visual fidelity compromise? Our research will take its two complementary directions from the two above questions, resulting in prototype systems and investigations of their effectiveness with user studies. Surprisingly, only a few such usability studies have been performed previously. This research will fill this gap, producing knowledge, guidelines, heuristics and software that will improve the usability of interactive 3D graphics applications. These applications include scientific, medical and information visualization; walkthroughs for architectural and design review; entertainment; simulators for military, medical and driver training; computer aided design; and simulators for psychiatric therapy and psychological experimentation.