Funded PhD position: HCI at Grenoble Alpes University France

[Johannes Schöning]

If you like the alps, nature and interactive surfaces, here is your PhD position! Please share further! 

best, 

Johannes

From: Nigay Laurence <Laurenc...@imag.fr>

Subject: Re: Funded PhD position: HCI at Grenoble Alpes University France

Date: 1 April 2016 at 21:14:35 CEST

To: christi...@googlemail.com

A PhD studentship is available in the domain of HCI and more specifically in the field of multi-surface and multi-user environments. This work will be lead as part of a research project AP2 (http://ap2.immersion.fr/ <http://ap2.immersion.fr/>) that started in January 2016 and that involves the University Grenoble Alpes and the University of Toulouse. 

The successful candidate will be a student of the doctoral school of University Grenoble Alpes and will be supervised by Laurence Nigay and Yann Laurillau (University Grenoble Alpes) as well as Emmanuel Dubois and Mathieu Raynal (University of Toulouse). 

Title: Pointing techniques in multi-surface and multi-user environments for mixed 2D/3D representations 

Research study: The research study focuses on the design and evaluation of interaction techniques for interactive environments involving multiple interactive horizontal and vertical surfaces (e.g., an interactive table, a large screen on the wall, several tablets and smartphones). Such interactive environments support collaborative activities with multiple users and are encountered in professional or general public situations. They are useful to (1) provide access to and (2) support the manipulation of sets of data of different nature (2D/3D, pictures, text, values, etc.). As part of the project AP2, the two application domains are (1) the review of architectural design projects involving an architect and clients and (2) a general public setting to explore a university campus and its services. 

Within such interactively rich environments, the research study will focus on the elementary task of pointing (in 2D and/or 3D). Pointing is an unavoidable elementary and generic interaction task: the universality of a pointing task results in innovations on pointing techniques having an important impact on interaction [1]. In this context, the research questions will include: how to assist a user in pointing at a particular 3D object, which device or modality can be used to both point at 2D and 3D objects [2], which feedback to provide to other users in order to be aware of the pointing action, which feedback to provide when the pointing gesture is across multiple horizontal and vertical interactive surfaces, how to support a multi-user pointing?

The expected results will be the design and development of pointing techniques and their experimental evaluation. Based on existing approaches (including those developed by the supervisors), it is also expected to develop a conceptual notation or model to appropriately describe pointing techniques in such environments and help reason about their design and their evaluation. 

Candidates should have a good Masters degree or equivalent degree in computer science, human-computer interaction or a closely related discipline. Candidates must have a strong interest in human-computer interaction and excellent programming skills (if possible with knowledge of 3D graphics programming e.g. scene graphs, OpenGL, unity3D). 

Contact: To apply, please send a complete CV together with the names and contact information of four referees by e-mail to:
Emmanue...@irit.fr <mailto:Emmanue...@irit.fr>, Yann.La...@imag.fr <mailto:Yann.La...@imag.fr>, Laurenc...@imag.fr <mailto:Laurenc...@imag.fr>, Mathieu...@irit.fr <mailto:Mathieu...@irit.fr>

Start date: October 2016 or before. Duration: 3 years.

References
1. Guillon, M., Leitner, F., Nigay, L. 2015. Investigating Visual Feedforward for Target Expansion Techniques. In Proceedings of the 33rd Annual ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '15), ACM, 2015, 2777-2786. http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/2702123.2702375 <http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/2702123.2702375>
2. Perelman, G., Serrano, M, Raynal, M., Picard, C., Derras, M., Dubois, E. 2015. The Roly-Poly Mouse: Designing a Rolling Input Device Unifying 2D and 3D Interaction. In Proceedings of the 33rd Annual ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '15), ACM, 2015, 327-336. http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/2702123.2702244 <http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/2702123.2702244>