Led by a multi-disciplinary group of Games Institute faculty members (including, Engineering, Math-Computer Science, Arts and AHS), the Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) Research Group is a central collaboration initiative for Games Institute members involved in HCI research. Members of this research group stem from individual faculty-led labs; for example: HCI Touch Lab (Mark Hancock, MSCI), Haptic Computing Lab (Oliver Schneider, MSCI), Multisensory Brain and Cognition Lab (Michael Barnett-Cowan, Kinesiology), HCI+Health Lab (Jim Wallace, School of Public Health), HCI Games Group (Lennart Nacke, Stratford School of Interaction Design and Business), among others.
This large group of faculty and graduate students meets once per week in the Games Institute’s Presentation Room and/or via Games Institute-supported Slack (post-COVID) to provide ongoing knowledge exchange, present and critique current research, discuss new initiatives, serve as an informal peer-review space for student conference presentations/publications, form collaborations for studies and articles, and create social interactions between the various labs and research groups. Meetings of the group are open to visitors from the Games Institute, other Waterloo departments and centres, and other universities who wish to explore new topics.
In May 2020, following the restrictions brought forward by the COVID-19 pandemic and the subsequent cancellation of many discipline-specific conferences/workshops (including CHI 2020), members of the HCI Research Group organized a virtual conference for HCI researchers at Waterloo to ensure that – despite the cancellations – students had an opportunity to present their research and to engage in conversations about cutting-edge research spanning haptic user experiences, food literacy games, player behaviour on large displays, VR in the workplace, and other areas. Leveraging the Games Institute’s support, a digital record of the presentations is publicly accessible to provide HCI graduate researchers with a platform to present a year’s worth of CHI 2020 research that would have otherwise remained unpublished.
The Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) community at the Games Institute has grown considerably due in part to the connections the researchers were able to make with other Games Institute members. For example, when new faculty members Drs. Oliver Schneider (MSCI), Daniel Harley (Stratford School), and Leah Zhang-Kennedy (Stratford School) joined the Games Institute, they were introduced to faculty members leading the HCI labs. Through this connection, they joined the weekly lab meetings, which led to them to becoming permanent faculty members in the Games Institute HCI community. Subsequently, they brought in their own students to the lab meetings so that those students could connect with Games Institute members. As the Games Institute attracts more researchers to join the HCI community, more interdisciplinary perspectives are added, which strengthens the overall support available to each individual. Consequentially, researchers are exposed to more ideas, receive more robust feedback for their publication submissions, and gain access to more opportunities for collaborations with other scholars and industry partners.