In accordance with the »Weimar Model«, research-oriented projects are a large and defining part of the Master’s programme. Most projects are done in groups, and some involve an interdisciplinary team of students. HCI projects focus on design, implementation and evaluation of software systems and interfaces or on designing, planning and running user studies.
Projects are conducted in close collaboration with supervising professors and their research assistants. They require considerable autonomy from students and train general transferable skills via group work and independent research. This makes them an excellent preparation for the Master theses. Students have to do 2 projects, a smaller (12 ECTS) and a larger one (18 ECTS) (current curriculum, since 2019). A further project could be taken and brought into the Electives module.
Check out some of the projects run at our faculty:
Instrumentation of Public Space for Social Interaction. Multi-user interface for public space, using a self-built wireless input- and output-modules
ShakeCast: a system for automatic peer-to-peer exchange of contact information between two persons who just shook hands, based on accelerometer data. The team further evaluated their system with 20 volunteers.
Combining head and eye movements for multimodal interaction in HCI: a comparison of eyes-only and eye-and-head-movement as input techniques for a search-and-select task.
Frustration in gaming: Physiological & behavioural correlates: measuring skin conductance change and heart rate variability (plus questionnaire reports) in response to task difficulty (and extra interferences) during a computer game
Conversational News. Creating the foundations for a system that enables even small publishers to publish written news articles on smart speakers in an engaging manner, with a web-interface for journalists to publish news, and an Alexa-powered smart speaker interface for news consumers to query for and listen to the written articles.
Exploring Interactive Theatre. Using interactive technologies on the stage - a large interdisciplinary project group (from Computing, Media Architecture, Design) developed a 20 minute theatre piece.
MMM Ball: an interactive demo of a Massive Mobile Multiuser Framework (and here an article in German )
Social Virtual Reality. Project on 3D telepresence
Interaction in Social Virtual Reality. exploring the interaction opportunities for collaborative virtual environments, students developed novel solution approaches and toolsets
Mobile Information Visualization. This project investigated how to design and implement prototype visualizations for smartphones or smartwatches that overcome the limitations of the screen space and make use of available input modalities on such devices
Touch the Time - A Touch-Centered Interaction Paradigm for Time-Oriented Data Visualization. This started as a student project and was continued in a theses, resulting in the linked publication.
Data-Driven Objects - interdisciplinary project with students from product design, Computer Science and HCI on data physicalization - making data legible and physical - that built two installations that were selected for the Marke.6 Bauhaus-Essentials 2018. One of these (Trommelwirbel) was also exhibited in 2019 in an exhibition on contemporary Bauhaus-Uni works at Galerie Eigenheim, Berlin