Joe Marshall's HCI Research
 

Project Ideas - Masters

Here are some project ideas for MSc summer projects

MSc students are also welcome to look at the undergrad projects below, but do be aware that some of them are quite technical and could potentially be quite meaty.

Physiotherapy Games

Build a game to support physiotherapy exercises. I’m kind of flexible as to what you do on this project, but I would recommend that you focus on a particular category of exercise and create a game that supports the exercise, either by visually tracking it (e.g. for a mobile or laptop based game using the onboard camera), or by tracking arm motion using controllers on a VR headset based game. Beyond the primary task of building a fun game you will need to consider how to ensure that people do the exercise with good form, how to adapt to differing levels of physical ability, whether you can measure ability and progress as people use the game etc.

Project Ideas - Undergraduate

Here are some project ideas for undergraduate projects: If you want to discuss any of these ideas further, drop me an email or book a meeting with me on:

https://outlook.office365.com/book/Joesprojectstudentmeetings@UniofNottm.onmicrosoft.com/

No Display Full Body Games

Most games use some form of display to feed-back to the user. This is particularly true of games that use full-body physical input. However the need to always have a view of a screen limits the ability of the user to move their body. For this project you will build audio only (or maybe haptics?) games in which players will use their whole body to interact. Beyond that it is up to you - how you sense the body (webcam, VR headset, smartphone accelerometer, some craziness with a gamepad… ) and what game you build with it is absolutely up for discussion. However you do it, this project quite likely requires a certain level of technical ability to make sensors and interaction work, and ideally a love of games to build something fun.

Tracking people with VR Front Cameras

Modern virtual reality headsets have front mounted cameras which are primarily used to provide video passthrough. However it is also possible to do things on them, including computer vision. In this project, you will use the front cameras on a VR headset along with machine learning models to track people and implement some kind of interaction (a game, some way to interact with the headset wearer, whatever you decide).

This project is relatively technical in that you will ahve to be comfortable coding for an Android device, either on Unity, Unreal or Godot engines. I’m not expecting anyone to implement the tracking models from scratch for this project, but running them involves a certain amount of programming.

Punchbag VR Game

I have a large hanging punchbag. For this project you will implement some kind of fighting/martial arts game using the punchbag and a VR headset. You may want to use extra sensors on the punchbag to detect hitting it (we have hardware to do this available from the Comp4104 module), or do something smart with the headset camera or microphone, or orchestrate the game to make sure the person is in the right place when they are going to hit things.

This project will require you to be comfortable using a game engine and generally doing some programming.

You’ll also be expected to do some kind of user study of this. If you are more HCI focused, you may wish to build a less technical prototype and do a broader user study, and vice-versa for more programming focused students.

It’s behind you - simulating new body parts in vr gaming

In this project, you’ll build a vr game which simulates the possibility of having new body parts, such as tails, horns, extra arms and legs, spines on your back etc. This has lots of fun challenges, such as how do you simulate the extra weight of these appendages and their effect on balance, how do people control things which are behind them or otherwise out of their view, can you alter the visual effects of walking or moving to make it feel to the user like they are affected by the appendages, how do you want the user to pose to play, e.g. do you want them to play on all fours as a unicorn? I’m open as to what game is built with this. In my head I have some kind of open-ended smash-em up thing, where you can be various fantastical creatures, and you have to destroy an environment as much as possible, but I think there are loads of fun ways you could run with this idea.

This is a project which will probably involve quite a lot of programming and will be done either in unity or Godot game engines, on oculus quest (we have them for borrowing).

Asymmetric Mixed Reality Gaming

Traditional approaches to virtual reality assume that the user is immersed in a virtual world and does not care about what is going on outside. For this project you’ll build a game where players wearing a VR headset must work with or play against people outside the headset. For example you might build a game of charades where the VR player has to act out something they see in the headset, or a game where the VR experience encourages people to move their body in a particular way, and the spectators have to interpret this somehow. Or if you’re feeling technically minded you could make a networked smartphone and headset game. This idea is deliberately vague because I want you to have the game ideas and explore them. Similar to the above, game coding experience is pretty useful for this project.

If you want to send me your ideas

If you have a cool idea that you want to work on, hit me up with it. Things I’ll happily supervise:

  • Interesting things with sensors, especially if they’re anything to do with tracking exercise or bodily motion in some way.

  • Full body and exercise games.

  • Doing odd things with virtual reality or augmented reality. Particularly messing with people’s senses.

  • Other games or art things.

My research work is about exploring new ways of interacting with computers through the use of sensors. Most of my work looks at this by building entertainment applications, such as games, artworks and sports tracking systems.

I am interested in supervising both more pure HCI focused projects where I will expect you to design and build something then study it with users, or more ubicomp style sensor processing projects where you will develop a sensor processing algorithm of some kind then analyse the quality of that algorithm using quantitative testing.

Some research areas I’m particularly active in, so likely to say yes to a project in:

Sensory misalignment in VR

We have recently been building a number of systems that exploit ‘sensory misalignment’, where the user experiences contradictory sensations in different senses, for example by using virtual reality headsets to create 3d environments where the view moves differently to how the person is moving in the physical world. This can create exciting experiences that are otherwise physically impossible. Most practical projects in this area make use of VR or AR headsets (which we have a stock of) and require some knowledge of 3d development.

VR and physical objects

I’m interested in how people interact with real world physical objects whilst they are in virtual reality, and what that means for user experience and interaction. The punch-bag game above is an example of this stuff, I’m also interested in use of physical props, balancing on things with feet or hands whilst in VR, and probably anything else you can think of where physical objects are combined with VR.

Sensor processing for sport or exercise

I’d be interested in projects relating to sensing of sport and exercise. What I am looking for here is something which goes beyond basic tracking of location or steps, to look at measures such as quality of movement, analysis of more complex skill based movements such as bodyweight exercises, martial arts or racket sports, or evaluation of interactions between multiple sportspeople. This could either be a primarily sensor processing project where you use machine learning processing of smartphone sensors or computer vision to track human motion and measure how well your algorithm works, or a more HCI focused project where you build a complete system for exercise users (e.g. an exercise tracker or a game driven by physical exertion) and evaluate it.

Cool and odd games things

Your idea here