I have begun looking to institutions in Northern Europe the UK and Canada with an interest in Dynamic Media and Embodied HCI. There seems to be a high degree of networked collaboration between institutions and projects and so there will be some crossover.
I began with ReFlex the Flexible Reality Centre which is a research centre focussing on the application and accesibility of 3d modelling and ‘virtual reality’ technology to the general community for primarily both business and professional (design) ends. The focus appears to be making VR accessible/profitable for working professionals and medium to small business use. The site is largely concerned with presentation of a masters program specializing in delivering VR/Modelling skills and applying them to fairly straightforward VR models concerned with agile prototyping, presentation, walk-throughs and etc. The Flexible Reality centre is attached to the University of Lund Sweden. There is little research presented on this site apart form masters theses concerned with modeling.
The ReFlex centre is a part of the Enactive Network of/for Excellence which is concerned with Enactive HCI design. From the Enactive website;
The driving concept of Enactive Interfaces is then the fundamental role of motor action for storing and acquiring knowledge (action driven interfaces). Enactive Interfaces are then capable of conveying and understanding gestures of the user, in order to provide an adequate response in perceptual terms. Enactive Interfaces can be considered a new step in the development of the human-computer interaction because they are characterised by a closed loop between the natural gestures of the user (efferent component of the system) and the perceptual modalities activated (afferent component). Enactive Interfaces can be conceived to exploit this direct loop and the capability of recognising complex gestures. Intelligent interfaces recognise the gesture of the user at the beginning of the action and are able to interpret the gestures (in terms of intentions, skills and competence) and to adapt to them in order to improve the users performance.
Enactive is actually a loose network of sattelite projects and institutions that undergo diverse projects generally conceived under that banner and committed to the exchange of information through that network and an accompanying conference. The conference is in Grenoble in November of this year. There is quite a lot of published work on this site and I have only just started to sort through it. Much of these publications point directly to interesting projects at partner institutes.
One interesting Partner institute was the CERTEC division at Department of Design Sciences at Lund Univerity’s Faculty of Engineering, Lund, Sweden. CERTEC is concerned with Rehabilitation Engineering and Design and Situated Research and Design for Everday Life . The division’s publications are available here.
Another Enaction partner is Miralab and although well outside your region of interest (Geneva) is nonetheless of interest for the magnitude and diversity of dynamic media and HCI projects with which it is engaged. There is also a great number of recent papers on mixed and virtual realities, tele-presence, and graphics generally (this is a dhtml site without perma-links so look under ‘projects’.) – While I’m stuck in Switzerland check out this VRLab also attached to the Enaction Network for some interesting HCI/Haptics papers.
While I’m here I’ll post this link to HMC Interactive an interesting UK (Plymouth) Commercial Design company that does interesting work with responsive projections and has worked on a number of projects with a social bent. Particular interesting is the work done for the Montana Assistive Technology Centre.
Getting back on track the VRlab at Aalborg University began as an interdisciplinary centre with representatives from both the Faculty of Humanities and the Faculty of Engineering and Science working together. Focus would be on Virtual Reality as a technology and as a medium. There are a number of interesting VR applications and facilties that use a combination of ‘cave’ and theatre like reality projections both of which also employ either passive (polarized lenses) or active (shutter glasses) stereo vision systems. The most intriguing project here are the Data mining and theatrical applications of the technology but the centre also works on community and industry visualizations. There are no published papers at this site but some promotional documentation of projects and facilities. The data mining and 3D Visualization of data fields is documented here. It is interesting in so far as it realizes the potential of VR once we move away from straight representation allowing a dynamic interaction with data via a spatio-temporal rendering – a shift from VR presenting an ideal reality to augmenting the real by producing the potential for new relational interactions with implications that shape the development of actual bodies.