Sensory Perception & Interaction Research Group

University of British Columbia

Colin Swindells

PhD Student

Colin completed his PhD in SPIN in 2007, supervised by Karon MacLean and Kelly Booth.

Year Departed: 
2008

Steve Yohanan

PhD Student

Steve received his PhD from SPIN in 2012, as the first architect of the Haptic Creature project.

Year Departed: 
2012

Oliver Schneider

PhD Student

Oliver is interested in how people design, create, and work with new technology, especially combining the physical, digital, and social worlds. Right now, he is working on Haptic Experience Design, developing tools and techniques to work with touch-based technology. He also maintains research interests in expressive interaction techniques, STEM education and learning technology, persuasive computing, and software engineering.

Oliver was with the SPIN lab from 2010-2016. He holds a BSc (Honours) in Computer Science from the University of Saskatchewan (2010), and an MSc (2012) and PhD (2016) in Computer Science from University of British Columbia. He worked with Disney Research Pittsburgh as a lab associate and then research consultant during 2014-2015.

Personal Homepage: 
http://oliverschneider.ca
Year Departed: 
2016
Publication: 
Schneider, O. and MacLean, K. E., “Studying Design Process and Example Use with Macaron, a Web-based Vibrotactile Effect Editor,” in Proc. of HAPTICS Symposium, Philadelphia, PA, 2016.
Schneider, O., Israr, A., and MacLean, K.E., “Tactile Animation by Direct Manipulation of Grid Displays,” in Proc. of Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology (UIST), Charlotte, NC, 2015.
Schneider, O., MacLean, K.M., "Improvising Design with a Haptic Instrument," Haptics Symposium, 2014, pp 327-332.
Karuei, I., Schneider, O., Stern, B., Chuang, M., MacLean, K.M., "RRACE: Robust Realtime Algorithm for Cadence Estimation," Pervasive and Mobile Computing, vol. 13, 2014, pp. 52-66.
Schneider, O. S., Seifi, H., Kashani, S., Chun, M., & MacLean, K. E. (2016, May). "HapTurk: Crowdsourcing Affective Ratings of Vibrotactile Icons." In Proceedings of the 2016 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (pp. 3248-3260). ACM.
Schneider, O., and MacLean, K. E. “Reflections on a WYFIWIF Tool for Eliciting User Feedback,” in CHI Workshops - Tactile UX. Toronto, CAN: ACM, 2014, pp. 5 pages.
Schneider, O., "Using Gait as an Input Modality for Mobile Exercise Games,", M.Sc. Thesis, University of British Columbia, 2012.
Dawson, J., Schneider, O., Ferstay, J., Toker, D., Link, J., Haddad, S. and MacLean, K. E. “It’s Alive! Exploring the Concept of a Living Phone,” in Proc. of Graphics Interface, Regina CAN, pp. 205-212, 2013.
Schneider, O. et al “Real-time Gait Classification for Persuasive Smartphone Apps: Structuring the Literature and Pushing the Limits,” in Proc. of Int'l Conf in Intelligent User Interfaces (IUI '13), Santa Monica, USA, pp. 161-172 2013.

Idin Karuei

PhD Student

I am a PhD candidate in the Department of Computer Science at the University of British Columbia. I am a member of SPIN Lab and my supervisor is Dr. Karon MacLean. My research topic is Spatiotemporal Vibrotactile Guidance.

I have a Master of Applied Science in Electrical Engineering in the field of Systems and Control from Concordia University and Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering in the field of Electronics from the University of Tehran.

 

Year Departed: 
2014

Hasti Seifi

PhD Student

Hasti is interested in design and evaluation of tactile sensations, interfaces and new interactions based on the sense of touch. The objective of her PhD research is to empower ordinary users, having no previous design knowledge, to design or customize vibrotactile feedback for their needs. 

To this end, she investigates:

  • Perception of tactile sensations,
  • Tactile customization tools, and workflows,
  • Effective evaluation methodologies for tactile sensations.

She received her Masters degree from the School of Interactive Arts and Technology at Simon Fraser University in 2010 and her Bachelor's degree from University of Tehran in 2008. 

 

GitHub page: https://github.com/hastiseifi/

Personal Homepage: 
http://www.cs.ubc.ca/~seifi/
Year Departed: 
2017