Softwarepraktika

Arduino is a popular open source hard­ware and soft­ware plat­form that can be used to »di­gi­ta­lize« phy­si­cal ob­jects. In this pro­ject we will use an Ar­du­ino mi­cro­con­trol­ler and stre­tch sen­sors to ex­plo­re ways to cre­ate elas­tic ob­jects that can be used as com­pu­ter in­put de­vices.

In the first pro­ject pha­se you will get fa­mi­liar with the Ar­du­ino Soft­ware (IDE) and its ba­sic hard­ware (sen­sors and con­troller boards). The work in the se­cond pro­ject pha­se will fo­cus on read­ing data from a stre­tch sen­sor and on pre­par­ing this data for further use on an Android smart­phone and/or smart­watch.

Technologies & Tools: Arduino • Android

Contact: Dr. David Ahlström

Today’s smart­watches are equipped with high-quality sen­sors, such as a gyro­scope and an acc­e­lero­meter. These sen­sors could open up new poss­i­bili­ties to ex­tend the user’s input vo­ca­bul­ary be­yond the smart­watch’s small touch­screen. This pro­ject aims at inter­preting the sen­sor sign­als that are gene­rated when the user ges­tures in the air or swi­pes a finger (on the hand where the watch is worn) across an un­even sur­face and to map signal patterns to in­put commands.

So far, a soft­ware pack­age has been im­ple­mented that en­ables long-term logging of the smart­watch’s sensor data while the user goes about doing his or her daily acti­vities. The next two steps in this pro­ject can either be comp­leted as two sepa­rate Bach­elor pro­jects by two groups of students or in com­bi­na­tion as a Master pro­ject for one student.

PROJECT A – Analyzer Module
The analyzer module is a soft­ware pack­age that can be used to ana­lyse the logged raw sensor data and to iden­tify regu­lari­ties and patt­erns in data. The core of the mo­dule will be a Support Vec­tor Ma­chi­ne that can be trained to auto­mati­cally class­ify seq­uences of sen­sor data into pattern categories.

PROJECT B – Test Module
The test module is a soft­ware pack­age that pro­vides the ne­cess­ary func­tion­ality to run a user study where par­ti­ci­pants wear a smart­watch while swip­ing a finger across a series of diff­erent every­day objects with non-flat (bumpy) surfaces, such as a comb, a bottle, or a com­puter keyb­oard. The in­ten­tion with such a user study is to collect the vib­ration sig­nals picked up by the sen­sors in the smart­watch and then com­pare these sign­als with sig­nals that are gene­rated when a user goes about doing his or her daily acti­vities (using the ana­lyzer mo­dule from Project A).

Technologies & Tools: Java • Android • Support Vector Machine

Contact: Dr. David Ahlström

In the graphic design comm­unity and in the usa­bility commu­nity there is an on-going di­s­cuss­ion about how fast and easy peo­ple can read text on com­puter moni­tors and smart­phone screens. The read­abil­ity of a text piece is influ­enced by sev­eral fact­ors. Such as the letter size, text and back­ground color, the line length, and the shape of the in­di­vi­dual char­acters mak­ing up the text.

The intended out­come of this pro­ject is a soft­ware pack­age that pro­vi­des the func­tio­na­lity that is ne­cessary to con­duct user studies on read­a­bility. This in­cludes func­tio­na­lity to con­fi­gure diffe­rent test cases (i.e., com­bi­na­tions of various text attri­butes such as letter size, text color, and type­face) and func­tio­nality to pre­sent the different test cases to study par­tici­pants, as well as func­tio­nality to log the time par­tici­pants need to read the text in the diffe­rent test cases.

Technologies & Tools: Java

Contact: Dr. David Ahlström

The econob – Informationsdienstleistungs GmbH offers several practica (Softwarepraktikum) in the area of software evolution analysis and quality assurance in software engineering. Check out the TEWI blog for more information on available practica or contact Martin Pinzger.

Busy people with tight time schedu­les and full calen­dars often face pro­blems find­ing empty »slots« in their sche­dules for new appoint­ments. Often, persons ne­go­tiate about the date and time for an up­coming meet­ing over email, send­ing a list of possible dates and times to meet, back and forth.

Re­mark­ably, with elec­tro­nic calen­dars, such as the iCal App, it is diffi­cult to quickly become an over­view of empty time slots between day X and Y. More­over, the user cannot gene­rate a list that only con­tains empty time slots.

The out­come of this pro­ject is a util­ity app for macOS and iOS that reads the stored iCal cal­en­dar events and pro­vides power­ful filt­ering func­tio­nality to let the user easily view and export infor­mation about both up­coming events and empty time slots that are avail­able for new meetings.

Accordingly, in this project you get the chance to learn and prac­tice GUI (Graphical User Inter­face) pro­gramm­ing using Apple’s de­ve­lop­ment tools. You also have the possi­bility to con­tri­bute with an app in the App Store!

Technologies & Tools: Swift • Cocoa • Xcode

Contact: Dr. David Ahlström

Recent advances in soft­ware and hard­ware tech­no­logy for ob­ject track­ing make it now possi­ble to de­tect and accu­rately track the position of virt­ually any object that is moved around within the range of the track­ing hard­ware. In this pro­ject we will ex­plore how a Leap Motion Cont­roller can be used to track a user’s fingers and hands as they move around on and above the key­board and back and forth bet­ween the key­board and the mouse while the user is surf­ing the Web.

The intention is to design suit­able finger and hand gest­ures that can serve as alter­native in­put mech­a­nisms. For ex­ample, wigg­ling up and down with a finger could be mapped to window scroll­ing and a quick point­ing gest­ure to the left could be used to re­load the pre­vious web­page.

In this project you will get fa­mi­liar with the Leap Motion Controller and its API and then imple­ment a »gesture module« that maps finger and hand track­ing infor­mation to vari­ous inter­face actions, such as for switch­ing bet­ween appli­cations, copy & paste, scroll­ing, or zooming.

This project can be adapted to suite as a Master pro­ject (by also dev­elop­ing a »test module« that uses the »gest­ure mo­dule« and by cond­ucting a user experi­ment on in-air gestures).

Technologies & Tools: Java • Python • C++ (your pick!)

Contact: Dr. David Ahlström