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Welcome to the Interaction Lab Wiki

The Interaction Lab brings together I-Tech and CreaTe students and HMI researchers to collaborate on all things that involve the use and creation of interactive technology. As part of your courses and projects you will often be working with all kinds of different facilities that fall under our lab. This Wiki is the central starting point for everything lab-related. We regularly update the Wiki and add more detailed information and documentation about using the lab's equipment and software.

Daniel Davison is the lab manager. The lab is located on the first floor of the Citadel, room H107.

General contact e-mail address: [email protected]

Your input for this Wiki is very welcome! Please contact the lab manager or create a GitHub issue if you have any questions or suggestions, or if you want to request (or contribute) specific tutorials or documentation.

Reserving equipment

The lab has a bunch of equipment available that you can use for your projects. You check the availability and make a reservation: https://utwente-interaction-lab.github.io/reservations.html. If the equipment is not listed or if you have questions or remarks please contact us: [email protected]

Reserving lab spaces

Depending on availability it is possible to reserve the lab for user studies, demos, project meetings, etc. For information you can contact [email protected]. To check the availability you can add the lab agenda to your Outlook.

Gather Town

We have a license for Gather Town, a social meeting platform. Check out the tutorials below to see if this platform is something for you:

Robots

The lab has several robots that you can use for your projects, check out the full list here. Below are some tutorials to get you started with the most popular robots:

Virtual Agents

Virtual agents can be a great way to add a human embodiment to your project. We have quite some experience building conversational agents. Check out the following tutorial:

Haptics

With haptics you add the modality of touch as part of your interaction. Although most implementations are custom-built (using e.g. vibration motors) we have some off-the-shelf products for you to use:

Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality

Many of our projects use Virtual Reality to immerse users in a 3D virtual world. The lab has a wide variety of headsets including HTC Vive, HTC Vive Pro Eye, Valve Index, HP Reverb G2, Oculus Quest (2), Microsoft Hololens (2). When using headsets during COVID, make sure you properly disinfect the headset and controllers, and use disposable paper eye masks (available in the lab). The following resources should help get you started:

Unity Assets

We have a curated collection of open source Unity game assets available to use in your projects. This includes models, textures, prefabs, scripts, scenes, etc. that have been created as part of projects and courses. Let us know if you have created your own assets that you would like to include here.

Cloud computing and DSI cluster

A large part of what we do in CreaTe and ITech is recognising and interpreting/understanding human behaviour. Doing so requires specialised AI and Machine Learning tools, as well as considerable computing power. Many cloud providers offer tools for this, often with free trials for students.

The university offers the Virtual Research Environment, which runs in the Microsoft Azure cloud. Alternatively, our students and researchers can request access to the on-campus DSI cluster, a network of high-performance servers and workstations that can be used for heavy computational tasks. Check out the following tutorials to get started:

Working with electronics

When choosing the brains of projects, a lot of options are available and sometimes a combination of multiple. These brains are also called Micro Controllers (and Raspberry Pi), these controllers read the sensors, command the actuators and send the data around to other connected devices.

The Interaction Lab currently does not have the necessary equipment to work with lower-level electronics (microcontrollers, motors, sensors, etc). But often you might find yourself using them in your projects. We have compiled some tips and tricks about how to get started, where to find good resources but also where you can work and lend/buy the components necessary.

Overview of common study activities

The Interaction Lab is developing a set of starting guilds to help you in your studies. Here are the resources that have been collected so far.