Three student teams have been accepted into the ACM User Interface Software and Technology Student Innovation Contest taking place in Honolulu this October 5th to 8th. The UIST competition “is to innovate new interactions on state-of-the-art hardware,” and this year’s focus is household interfaces. The student teams and their projects are:

Team members:
Yuanyuan Lin (MS-HCI)
Zhengyang Shen (MS-HCI)
Mickey Muzi Li (MS-HCI)
Alan Dingtian Zhang (MS-CS)

Project: FoodieBuddy
FoodieBuddy is your best friend in the kitchen. It provides recipe suggestions based on your choice of ingredients and detects your need to prepare the right tool for you. You can control the whole FoodieBuddy set with voice or gestures during the whole cooking process -- no more oily hands on your device! FoodieBuddy will also be your note taker should you have any thoughts and tips to share with others.

Team Members
Yuan Gao (MS-HCI)
Chong Guo (MS-DM)

Project: MusePillow
We propose MusePillow, an intimate, soft and expandable interface for music spa. No matter whether you’re getting to sleep, just having a rest, or even faced with insomnia, MusePillow can help with its stereo effect. MusePillow also lightens the pain of feeling your smartphone in the dark. With two touch-pads, a zipper and gyroscope, MusePillow interacts with the user naturally through tap, hold, shake, slide and so on. We also expect to demo how to connect MusePillow with other household devices such as lights and fans.

Team Members:
Paul Lazarus (MS-HCI)
Rushil Khurana (MS-HCI)

Project: Indoor Navigation for the Visually Impaired
Imagine how easy life for the visually impaired would be if their house could "talk" to them. Making houses more accessible is the main idea behind this project. In a nutshell, the prototype would allow furniture inside the house to communicate with the someone who is visually impaired with a message of <distance, direction>. For example, a chair would send a response of “2 feet North” to the person equipped with a Bluetooth earpiece (audio feedback) when the person is in range/vicinity. The basic advantage of attaching the sensor directly to the furniture is that the <distance, direction> pair would always be relative to the receiver; hence allowing movement of furniture, which is a typical problem faced in audio mapping of a space in navigation solutions for the visually impaired.