SICSA DemoFest 2018

Earlier this week I was at SICSA DemoFest in Edinburgh, talking about acoustic levitation and some of the work we’ve been doing on the Levitate project.

For more information about Levitate and the awesome work we’ve been doing, follow us on Twitter (@LevitateProj), check out the project website, and see more photos and videos here.

Want to make your own acoustic levitator? You can build a simpler version of our device using Asier Marzo’s instructables instructions.

Image used in my demo presentation. The image illustrates what a standing wave looks like and has a brief explanation about how acoustic levitation works: small objects can be levitated between high-amplitude areas of the standing sound wave and objects can be moved in mid-air by moving the sound waves.
A close-up photo of our demo booth at the event. We demonstrated a levitation device with a polystyrene bead being moved in a variety of patterns in mid-air.

Posters, SICSA HCI and Second Year Viva

SICSA HCI Lanyard

June has gotten off to an exciting start! I won a poster presentation competition, got a poster paper into Mobile HCI ’14 and scheduled my annual progress review. I’ve arranged my 2nd year viva, which is an annual progress review for my PhD research. Finishing and submitting my report felt a little anticlimactic compared to last year; I suppose the first year review is much more important and by this stage it’s more of a checkpoint. Lately I’ve been writing and research planning a lot so I’m looking forward to getting back to actually doing research. Designing, making, all those fun things that make HCI awesome! Yesterday was the SICSA HCI yearly meetup, which was good fun. This year it was hosted by University of Dundee so travelling to Dundee was nice. I spent a lot of time there as a kid, especially around the university campus, so it was cool to go back there and see how everything has changed. Highlights of the day included keynotes from Miguel Nacenta and David Flatla. Miguel presented some really cool research and David was so damn entertaining! We also had a few posters and a demo from our group. I won the poster presentation competition, which was a nice surprise. My poster (below) gave a general overview of my PhD research and showed off a couple of projects.

SICSA HCI Poster
SICSA HCI ’14 Poster

Winning the poster competition must have been a good omen because I returned home to a notification from Mobile HCI saying my poster was accepted. That paper and poster are about two gesture design studies from the start of my PhD. I’ll post more about them another time.