On June 30th the UNH IRES team (Rudra Timsina, Micheal Nyugin, Drea Fekety and myself) went to the HCI lab at the Hasso Plattner Institut just outside Berlin Berlin. Dominik Schmidt was gracious enough to show us around the institute. He also showed us some of the projects they are currently working on as well as some interesting ones they have done done in the past.
One project that I found particularly interesting was called Gravity Space. The project uses a huge 8 square meter glass floor with a 4k resolution projector in conjunction with an IR camera to track objects and people. A virtual version of all this is then projected onto the floor from underneath.
Their system recognizes and identifies people by their foot print on the glass. It then displays a virtual avatar of the person on the floor. I would strongly suggest checking out their project page over at the HPI website.
Other interesting projects were Haptic Turk, a human powered motion platform to make virtual reality more immersive, and faBrickation: which lets people include Lego brick structures as filler in 3d printed projects, allowing the printing process to be sped up significantly.