This is the first in a series of articles that I plan to write over the next few months.

Update (Oct. 28, 2019): Our team, Team Outeraction, has been specially mentioned as being among the top 5 out of all the teams participating internationally, after three tough rounds of expert panel reviews! This year’s edition had attracted very high quality submissions, compared to the previous years.

I participated in the OzCHI 2019 Student Design Challenge as part of Team Outeraction. We came up with a system to build and maintain social capital during adverse events, with specific consideration of Mumbai floods. We had a whole of 24 hours to develop the brainstorm on the provided brief and present our solution with a short video, paper and blog showing our process. I took up the responsibility of writing the paper. You can find our entire process on the Medium blog, including the final video explanation. It was a great learning experience!

Controller-less tracking frees the body to perform intuitive gestures to interact with computers. Leap Motion does just that: it is a special IR based hand tracking solution. Throw in an Oculus Rift into the mix and you are suddenly zipping through virtual space with shiny virtual hand avatars! I was working on implementation of some novel virtual object selection techniques and researching their efficacy in comparison to classic techniques like Raycasting. I was also researching the different feedback possibilities for a bespoke controller to enable non-visual access to virtual environments. These projects were a part of my six month internship at Embedded Interaction Lab, IIT Guwahati under the guidance of Dr. Keyur Sorathia and PhD students of the lab, Pranjal Borah and Shimmila Bhowmick. We hope to have our work published in upcoming conferences like TEI'20 and IEEE VR'20. Find out more about my research and publications here.

A small writeup on what went into designing the name tags, posters and standee for the SIGCHI-sponsored summer school on HCAI.

Six-month research internship at EILab under Dr. Keyur Sorathia’s guidance, Department of Design, IIT Guwahati. Developed Unity3D application (with C# scripting) to prototype and test various free hand gesture-based selection techniques in Immersive Virtual Environments. Also worked on a bespoke hand-held controller for non-visual exploration of virtual space.