Research

Update (Jan 2021): I am now part of the VVISE research group at Simon Fraser University under the supervision of Prof. Wolfgang Stuerzlinger!

Update (Nov 2020): Paper on gesture-based selection method published in ACM SUI 2020

Update (Feb 2020): Paper on tactile feedback published in ACM TEI 2020

My research interests mainly lie in the areas of Natural and Tangible User Interfaces, 3D User Interfaces (3DUI) and Virtual Reality. In all of my recent work, the underlying motivation is to create seamless interactions between humans and computers. Here I list the research labs and people I have worked with:

Research at VVISE Lab, Simon Fraser University (Jan 2021 – Dec 2023)

Futuristic XR user interfaces that are anchored to the user’s body, under the supervision of Prof. Wolfgang Stuerzlinger, School of Interactive Arts and Technology (SIAT).

Research at IVE Lab, IIIT-DM Jabalpur (Jan – Sep 2020)

Automatic smoke segmentation using deep learning methods under the guidance of Dr. Pritee Khanna, Dept. of Computer Science and Engg.

Research at Embedded Interaction Lab, IIT Guwahati (May – Nov 2019)

Six-month research internship under Dr. Keyur Sorathia’s guidance. My primary role in the lab was to aid in the development of virtual environments for user studies and contribute as an HCI researcher. The two projects I worked on:

• Comparison of different types of feedbacks for a bespoke tactile controller for non-visual exploration of virtual space.
  • Publication: Pranjal Protim Borah, Ayaskant Panigrahi, and Keyur Sorathia. 2020. TMOVE: Multimodal Feedback Actuator for Non-visual Exploration of Virtual Lines. In Proceedings of the Fourteenth International Conference on Tangible, Embedded, and Embodied Interaction (TEI ’20). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 603–610. DOI: 10.1145/3374920.3374994.
• Comparison of different gesture based selection methods for immersive virtual environments. Developed Unity3D application (with C# scripting) to prototype and test various free hand gesture based selection techniques.
  • Publication: Shimmila Bhowmick, Ayaskant Panigrahi, Pranjal Borah, Pratul Kalita, and Keyur Sorathia. 2020. Investigating the Effectiveness of Locked Dwell Time-based Point and Tap Gesture for Selection of Nail-sized Objects in Dense Virtual Environment. In Symposium on Spatial User Interaction (SUI ‘20). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, Article 26, 1–2. DOI: 10.1145/3374920.3374994

OzCHI 24-hr Student Design/Research Challenge (Aug 2019)

My team, Team Outeraction, featured in the top five amongst all participating teams worldwide in OzCHI SDC’19 as part of the 31st Australian Conference on Human-Computer-Interaction (OzCHI’19).

As part of coursework (2017 – 2019):

• Implementation of research paper titled “Parameter-Free Selective Segmentation With Convex Variational Methods” using OpenCV and Python as part of Image Processing course
• Implementation of research paper titled “A Fast Implementation of Deflate” using C and standard compression libraries like zlibc and lz4 as part of Design and Analysis of Algorithms course