The Games Institute acknowledges that we are living and working on the traditional territory of the Attawandaron (also known as Neutral), Anishinaabe and Haudenosaunee peoples. The University of Waterloo is situated on the Haldimand Tract, the land promised to the Six Nations that includes six miles on each side of the Grand River.
Systems Design Engineering
Victor Cheung was a PhD candidate from the Systems Design Engineering department at the University of Waterloo. He received his MPhil in Computer Science, B(Eng) in Computer Science Information Engineering from the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology.
He worked with the Collaborative Systems Laboratory, co-supervised by Stacey Scott and Ed Lank. His primary research interest is Human-Computer Interaction and its applications in interactive surfaces, particularly in the use of animation and other visual elements in interface design to better attract and guide novice users. In his spare time he also makes awesome coffee and casual games.
Sample Projects
Communication between collocated players in a shooting game
This project investigated the ways collocated players communicated with each other during a co-op shooting game. Several strategies were used to quickly establish mutual grounding of the situation, e.g., the location of an enemy/item. Some design recommendations were proposed to better support this genre of games.
Websocket and Processing
This project makes use of the new Websocket technology (an internet protocol for communication between a webserver and a browser), but instead of using off-the-shelf scripts I've built the server side almost from ground up. I've made the code written in Processing available via this [link].
Revisiting 3D scanning of oneself
A series of steps to 3D scanning a person using a MS Kinect, and eventually creating a bust sculpture rendering using Blender.
Step 1: Use Skanect to scan someone on a swivel chair
Step 2: Load into Blender and adjust
Step 3: Strategically bisect the model and set rendering parameters
Sample Publications and Presentations
Cheung, V., Chang, Y.-L., Scott, S.D. (2012). Communication Channels and Awareness Cues in Collocated Collaborative Time-Critical Gaming. In Proceedings of CSCW 2012: ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work, p. 569-578. Seattle, WA, February 11-15, 2012.
During collaborative gameplay players make use of various methods to become aware of the overall game status, develop strategies, and convey information to other players. Efficient and effective use of these methods is essential, especially during fast-paced time-critical collaborative games such as first-person shooters. This paper presents an observational study aimed to understand the communication channels and awareness cues used by players during gameplay to collaboratively achieve the game objectives. The study revealed that players utilize a variety of unconventional communication channels and awareness cues in both the physical and virtual environments to compensate for the inability to use commonly available collaborative human interaction mechanisms, such as eye gaze and gesturing, during gameplay. Players tended to use only auditory cues from their partner in the physical environment, while relying heavily on interacting with their partner through the virtual environment, using a variety of central and peripheral cues to maintain awareness during gameplay. Implications of these findings are discussed and recommendations for improving the quality of gameplay are provided.
Cheung, V., Scott, S.D. (2015). Studying Attraction Power in Proxemics-Based Visual Concepts for Large Public Interactive Displays. In Proceedings of ITS 2015: ACM Interactive Tabletops and Surfaces, p. 93-102. Madeira, Portugal, November 15-18, 2015.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/2817721.2817749
A key challenge in designing interfaces for large interactive displays deployed in public settings is to draw (and keep) a passerby's attention. Proxemic interactions--a design approach that applies human spatial behavior to guide system behavior in response to a user's proximity to a display--has been proposed for attracting and engaging potential users. Yet, the effectiveness of this approach has not been evaluated. Moreover, little research exists in the broader literature on the relative efficacy of possible visual design strategies to attract and engage large display users. We conducted a study to the effectiveness of promising visual concepts applied in a proxemic interactions framework: content motion and user shadows. While both visual concepts were more effective than a control condition at capturing attention, the inclusion of user's shadow was found to have stronger attraction power than content motion alone. In contrast, they were found to be ineffective for communicating possible user interactions in the display, limiting their potential to facilitate further system use.
For more information and to contact him, see Victor's personal website.
Affiliation:
University of Waterloo