Dr. Dominik Schmidt of the Hasso-Plattner Institute (near Berlin) was a kind enough host to let the IRES team (myself, Micah Lucas, Michael Nguyen, and Rudra Timsina) visit his lab on Monday, June 30th. He and some of his colleagues gave us a tour of their impressive facility and demonstrated some of the research that they’re currently working on.
One really neat setup they had was an “interactive floor,” whose hardware took up space in two rooms in their building (one on top of the other). The idea is that you can expand your working area to include the floor, and the floor-projected display can detect whether a person is standing on it, sitting in a chair on it, or sitting on the floor. Your adjustable display within the entire floorspace available (comparable to a program window displayed on your desktop monitor) can move with you as you move around the room and allows you to “drag” your workspace with you to different areas of the floor. Very, very interesting implications for future workplace designs.
We were also shown some work with their human-powered virtual-reality simulation system, which is actually a simpler concept than it sounds. Basically, you wear a head-mounted display while being held/carried in the air by four other people. Each person holds on to one ‘corner’ of your body, i.e., one person holds up the left leg, another one takes the right leg, one for the right arm, and another for the left arm. These four people get cues from the simulation about how to move the person they’re carrying (i.e., you) in order to simulate realistic motion and g-forces. It’s a surprisingly effective way to reduce the cost of expensive VR systems.
Overall, very neat work is being done in the HCI lab at the HPI campus. The researchers there are definitely people to keep an eye on for near-future HCI innovations.