Fundamentals of cognition (lecture)
How is our thinking organized? Do we all perceive the world in the same way? What directs our attention? This lecture provides the most important basics of cognitive psychological theories, findings, and methods. Content focuses on visual information processing, as well as attention and memory models relevant to human-computer interaction. By the end of the semester, participants should have gained an understanding of the mechanisms of human cognition and be able to apply these with respect to good interaction design. The course includes exercises with practical example scenarios.
Usability Engineering and Testing (lecture)
What makes a product or a service usable? The course will introduce to basic concepts of Usability Engineering and Testing. Emphasis will be put on quantitative methods. Our students learn how to set up controlled experiments and analyse behavioural data in order to determine the ease-of-use of a system in different development phases. The lecture is accompanied by practical lab work that allows students to apply the acquired knowledge while designing and testing applications in the field of Human-Computer Interaction.
Physiological Computing (lecture)
Physiological computing applies physiological data (skin conductance changes, pupil dynamics, heart rate variability etc.) to generate user-state representations and enable computer systems to dynamically adapt to changes in cognitive and/or affective processing. By connecting the brain/body to a machine, the boundaries of the nervous system are extended which enables us to communicate with technical devices directly via processes that underlie our thoughts and emotions. The course will provide basic knowledge on the human nervous system and introduce to concepts and methods of physiological computing. We will discuss selected examples from the current research by putting special emphasis on eye-tracking and pupillometry but also on recent developments in the field of Biofeedback and Brain-Computer Interfaces. Practical lab work will give our students the opportunity to collect and analyse data on gaze behaviour, pupil size changes and skin conductance responses.
Empirical Semester Project
The usability department regularly offers single-semester projects on different topics in the field of human-machine interaction.
Projekt Summer Term 26: Virtual Embodiment and Communication: Social VR-Avatar Perception (VECo2)
How does communicating through a gender-swapped avatar with realistic voice transformation affect our behavior and emotional states during conversation? This project builds an experimental platform for studying embodied social interaction in VR. Drawing on research into the Proteus Effect — the finding that avatar characteristics can meaningfully shape how we behave and how others perceive us — we create controlled conditions where participants embody gender-swapped avatars while hearing their own voice transformed to match. The work combines immersive VR development (expressive avatars with facial animation, lip-sync, and natural body language), real-time voice transformation (collaboration with DFKI SLT Berlin), and experimental design for social psychology research. The goal is a fully operational research environment that enables rigorous empirical investigation of identity, embodiment, and gender perception in virtual social encounters.