We want to understand how to use technology as a persuasive medium that works to make the world a better place.

Below are examples of research projects that GVU faculty and students are currently working on:

Imprint: Community Visualization of Printer Data
In 2004, U.S. companies used 3.2 billion reams of paper (that is 3 million sheets every minute). And office paper consumption is going up, not down. In fact, it's expected to grow by 50% by 2010. However, printed documents are important to businesses and workgroups. We also notice that workers socialize, collaborate informally, and stay aware of happenings in the printer area. Imprint is a visualization kiosk that runs in the printer area and depicts popular concepts, social connections, and sustainability data from the print stream.
Information Interfaces

dotLink360: Mobile Ecosystem Visualization
The mobile industry is in an era of tremendous change. Players in the market have formed a complex and dynamic network, and collaboration and competition have moved beyond traditional market boundaries. We are developing a visual analytics system that helps business executives, market analysts, and venture capitalists understand the competitive structure and dynamics of the mobile ecosystem. The system draws data from business alliances, press releases and patents, and provides a number of visualizations that give insight into the mobile industry from the perspective of companies, market segments and the ecosystem.
Information Interfaces

Community Mosaic
Community Mosaic is an application that celebrates the healthy eating successes within low-income African American communities. This population experiences extreme diet-related health disparities, yet there are many ways in which people are succeeding at eating well. Community Mosaic is a mobile phone + touch screen display application that allows people to share their healthy eating experiences with others in their local community. By sharing these experiences, community members provide locally relevant ideas for healthy living and encourage one another to eat well.
Work2Play Lab

Contextual Human Interaction Media Platform (CHIMP)
CHIMP is a 3rd party widget development platform and a 3rd party services framework for interactive TV and Video, where widgets can leverage locally available services, operator provider services, and services available via the Internet.
Research Network Operations Center

Newsgames: Journalism at Play
Videogames are native to computers rather than a digitized form of prior media. Games simulate how things work by constructing interactive models; journalism as game involves more than just revisiting old forms of news production. In the book Newsgames: Journalism at Play, Bogost, Ferrari, and Schweizer describe games that can be used to do journalism. Games that can persuade, inform, and titillate; make information interactive; recreate a historical event; put news content into a puzzle; teach journalism; and build a community.
Newsgames

Virtual Coach for Substance Abuse Intervention in the ER Training
This project involves an virtual coach that helps train medical practitioners how to properly deal with emergency room patients who have issues with substance abuse.
ADAM Lab

AR/Presence
Presence is a concept currently used in the VR community to evaluate the quality and effectiveness of virtual environments. Presence is defined as the “sense of being there” or, more appropriate for our purposes, “a perceptual illusion of non-mediation”. In this project, we are investigating presence for use in AR evaluation. In this first phase we are exploring what this concept means in a mixed reality setting, how existing measurement techniques such as questionnaires and physiological sensing can be applied to AR applications, and whether existing data regarding immersion factors and presence translate to the AR domain. Our first experiment recreates the virtual “pit” experiment done at UNC in AR with the goal of producing similar physiological effects on the study participants. The overall goal of this work is to generate evaluation techniques for AR as well as to begin defining design and usability guidelines for the creation of effective AR experiences.
Interactive Media Technology Center