Currently-taught courses

Semester in Alternate Realities

Recently-taught courses:

IAT 312: Foundations of Game Design

IAT 802: Quantitative Research Methods and Design

IAT 805: Graduate Colloquium

Previously-taught courses:

IAT 445: Immersive Environments

IAT 201: Human-Computer Interaction & Cognition

IAT 812: Cognition, Learning and Collaboration - and the Craft of Research and Scientific Writing for Publication

IAT 312: Foundations of Game Design

(first taught in Fall 2017)

Course outline

For their final game project, stu­dents were asked to design a non-digital game that includes Lazzaro’s so-called “seri­ous fun’ aspect: That is, the game should be mean­ing­ful or add value, e.g., by pro­vid­ing a novel/meaningful user expe­ri­ence, dif­fer­ent per­spec­tive, altered states etc.

Main tex­book: Game Design Workshop: A Playcentric Approach to Creating Innovative Games (2014) by Tracy Fullerton (avail­able online through the SFU library).

Pictures from final showcase on Dec 13, 2017

Sample Project Videos

Shelter   

ōBit   

StranDead   

Left Behind Bars   

False Illusion   

Rescue   

One Week to Refuge   

Questionnaire  

IAT 445: Immersive Environments

(first taught in Spring 2013)

Course Description

In this project-based course, you will use an immer­sion frame­work to design, create, and eval­u­ate immer­sive vir­tual envi­ron­ments and the inter­ac­tion between the user and the vir­tual envi­ron­ment. To do this, we will com­bine hands-on fun­da­men­tals with inter­ac­tion, ani­ma­tion, and immer­sive vir­tual real­ity design and the­o­ret­i­cal and research con­cerns. Your project will serve to both moti­vate and implement/showcase these aspects. The course will cul­mi­nate in a final inter­ac­tive project show­case and project pitch (oral/video) of your team project.

see SFU’s Teaching & Learning blog for a news story on my first offer­ing of this course in 2013, enti­tled: “How a SIAT course in immer­sive envi­ron­ments exposed stu­dents to the real world”

Course Objectives, Learning Goals & Outcomes

In this course, you will learn and be pre­pared to:

1.    Examine the his­tory and con­cep­tual frame­works sur­round­ing “immer­sion” and “immer­sive­ness” and what this means for dig­i­tal immer­sive envi­ron­ments and their users.

2. Apply a con­cep­tual frame­work in rela­tion to your own immer­sive project/interface and use it to cri­tique immer­sive projects like yours.

3. Demonstrate mod­er­ate pro­fi­ciency using appro­pri­ate soft­ware (cur­rently: Unity 3D) to design and build inter­ac­tive (includ­ing user inter­ac­tion and ani­ma­tion) immer­sive 3D vir­tual envi­ron­ments and dis­play them on off-the-shelf com­pu­ta­tional devices/displays (cur­rently: HMDs like the Oculus Rift).

4. Engage in a small team, to apply an agile and iter­a­tive inter­ac­tion design process to define project goals and processes, and then iter­a­tively design, build, eval­u­ate and refine an immer­sive envi­ron­ment and the user’s inter­ac­tion with it.

What’s in it for you?

In a nut­shell: you’ll learn how to design, build, and iter­a­tively refine a cool immer­sive and inter­ac­tive vir­tual envi­ron­ment that should blow the user away. To do this, you will use the pop­u­lar Unity 3D game engine and guid­ance from an immer­sion frame­work. If you manage to imple­ment it on your mobile phone/tablet using a simple card­board view like the  FOV2Go or the Oculus Rift, you’ll be able to show­case it wher­ever you go – includ­ing your next job inter­view and your next party. Combining a public project show­case with an exec­u­tive sum­mary and a final project video can fur­ther improve your resume/portfolio and marketability.

Virtual Reality - Going Beyond. IAT 445 Project showcase on Friday June 23, 2017, 10am-2:30pm

On Friday June 23, 2017, the stu­dents from my course on “immer­sive envi­ron­ments” (IAT 445) will be pre­sent­ing their final projects in the Mezzanine on our SFU Surrey campus, from about 10am — 2:30pm.

9 stu­dent teams will show­case their own immer­sive Virtual Reality projects that they devel­oped in the pop­u­lar game engine Unity3D and will present using the Oculus Rift head-mounted display.

Get ready to become a polar bear expe­ri­enc­ing the after­maths of our own deci­sion and how it affects global warm­ing, VR sur­vival train­ing while con­fronted with con­flict­ing inner voices, being a synaes­thete (seeing sound) in tur­moil over a con­flict of artis­tic aspi­ra­tions, unrav­el­ing the mys­ter­ies of an aban­doned man­sion, emo­tion­ally con­nect­ing to a child’s inner world by expe­ri­enc­ing their dreams, expe­ri­enc­ing the lone­li­ness of an aban­doned dog first-hand/paw, and much more.

Some projects draw from con­tem­po­rary indie/art com­puter games like Dear Esther, Journey, or Stanley’s Parable and cinema, fiction/sci-fi, and of course VR. Students were tasked to design for a pur­pose­ful and immer­sive user expe­ri­ence — this semester’s design chal­lenge for stu­dents was Going beyond: “Use unity3D and guid­ing frame­works (e.g., immer­sion, pres­ence, user-centered sys­tems design etc.) to iter­a­tively ideate, design, pro­to­type, and eval­u­ate an immer­sive and inter­ac­tive vir­tual envi­ron­ment expe­ri­ence that “goes beyond”: How could you pro­vide inter­est­ing, inspir­ing, or mean­ing­ful expe­ri­ences in VR? That is, what expe­ri­ences could you pro­vide in VR that are oth­er­wise dif­fi­cult, dan­ger­ous, or hard to expe­ri­ence? Instead of using VR as only a past-time and ulti­mate sen­sory over­load tool to wow people, how could you use it for some­thing more inter­est­ing, novel, excit­ing, or mean­ing­ful?” Be pre­pared for some excit­ing showcases!

In case you can’t make it to the inter­ac­tive project show­case, you can join the public project video pre­sen­ta­tion ses­sion on Thursday June 29^th  at 2:30pm, in Surrey room #5380, or wait for the best videos to be posted online.

See SFU’s media release, on publicnow.com for cur­rent media infor­ma­tion, and the Teaching & Learning blog for a news story on this course from Spring 2013, enti­tled: “How a SIAT course in immer­sive envi­ron­ments exposed stu­dents to the real world”

See my teach­ing page and SFU media release for more infos. The redesign of the 2013 offer­ing of the course was sup­ported by a Teaching and Learning Development Grant and invalu­able ongo­ing assis­tance by edu­ca­tional con­sul­tant Barb Berry.

Pictures from showcase:

Sample Project Videos

Forlorn

Canvas of Sound

Echo

Adrift

Finding Home

The Cave

Project posters:

Executive summaries that were handed out during the showcase

Showcase and Project Videos from Fall 2016 offering

IAT 445 immer­sive envi­ron­ments show­case Fall 2016

Below are the project posters and pic­tures from our show­case on Friday December 9^th 2016, where stu­dents from my course on “immer­sive envi­ron­ments” (IAT 445) pre­sented their final projects in the Mezzanine on our SFU Surrey campus, from about 10:00am — 2pm. See also SFU’s Media Advisory.

Students were tasked to design for a pur­pose­ful and immer­sive user expe­ri­ence — this semester’s design chal­lenge for stu­dents was evok­ing a strong yet mean­ing­ful feel­ing of empathy

Here’s the offi­cial SFU 1-minute cov­er­age of my IAT 445 Immersive Environments course:

and media cov­er­age from BlackPress at http://www.northdeltareporter.com/news/405786476.html]

Sample Project Videos

Parallel Minds

The Reef

The Painter

Retrograde

Below are the project posters:

and the first page of the executive  summaries (see here for Full pdf's)

other project pictures and materials:

Showcase and Project Videos from Summer Intersession 2015 offering

Below are the project posters and pic­tures from our show­case on Friday June 26^th 2015

this semester’s design chal­lenge for stu­dents was evok­ing a strong yet mean­ing­ful emo­tional or vis­ceral response using an immer­sive envi­ronemnt built with the game engine Unity3D that most stu­dents just started learn­ing at the begin­ning of the semester.

Sample Project Videos

 CDM by team Much VR

 Mystic by team Mystikal Lab

B-Eye by team Bees

The Passage by team M.O.S.T.

https://vimeo.com/132536087 Hooked by team Muffins

Project showcase on Friday November 28th 2014

Below are the project posters for the Fall 2014 showcase

Project posters:

Sample Project Videos

Omen by team Maze

Love &Grief

Sweet Sacrifice  by team super sparkly pink uni­corn 4K

Impressions from the showcase:

Showcase and Project Videos from Summer Intersession 2014 offering

Below are the project posters for the show­case on Friday June 20^th, 2014:

Sample Project Videos

Here are some of the final project videos of the teams:

Team Skywalker: Fall from the sky

Team Dream Up: Awakening

Sweets

Team Zissou: Glow

Team imag­i­nar­i­ous: Lukomorye

Impressions from the showcase:

Showcase and Project Videos from Fall 2013 offering

Below are the project posters for the show­case on Thursday Nov. 28 2013:

Sample Project Videos

Here are some of the final project videos of the teams:

Team Mindfulness: (REM)INISCENT

Team WAKE: WAKE

Team Segway: Azuria

Team Insanity: Conjecture

Impressions from the showcase:

Showcase, Project Videos, and Portfolios from Spring 2013 offering

Examples from Project Showcase

On April 4 & 5^th 2013, the stu­dents from the “immer­sive envi­ron­ments” course (IAT 445) pre­sented their final projects in the Mezzanine on our SFU Surrey campus. 9 Teams show­cased their own immer­sive Virtual Reality projects that they devel­oped in the pop­u­lar game engine Unity3D - for most of them this was their first expo­sure to the soft­ware. Below are first impres­sions of the show­case — thanks to all the stu­dents for their great contributions!  

Sample Project Videos

Here are some of the final project videos of the teams:

Team Pendulum: Finding Alice

Team UFOria: Alien Abduction

Team Underland: Underlurcker

Additional media cov­er­age: SFU media release

Student Portfolios

Below are some exam­ples from Student port­fo­lios which were cre­ated as part of this course to high­light stu­dents’ skills and projects and pro­mote their com­pet­i­tive­ness on the job market.
Amy Hsuanwen Wang
Devin Cook
Stefan Dalen
Sarah Han
Kyle Historillo
Khalid Abdullah
The redesign of the 2013 offer­ing of the course was sup­ported by a Teaching and Learning Development Grant and invalu­able assis­tance by edu­ca­tional con­sul­tant Barb Berry.

IAT 802: Quantitative Research Methods and Design

(taught in 2012, 2013, 2014, 2016, 2018 …)

Course Objectives, Learning Goals & Outcomes

The course struc­ture and teaching/learning activ­i­ties are designed around the fol­low­ing ques­tions. That is, by actively par­tic­i­pat­ing in this course, stu­dents should be able to effec­tively address the fol­low­ing ques­tions and per­form the respec­tive tasks:

1) What is sci­ence, the “sci­en­tific method” and quan­ti­ta­tive research? How do you think and argue like a good scientist?

2) Why do sci­ence? What is sci­en­tific & quan­ti­ta­tive research useful for?

• a) Why could you be excited about sci­ence? What drives and excites a researcher?
• b) What are advan­tages and dis­ad­van­tages of quan­ti­ta­tive & sci­en­tific research meth­ods (as com­pared to other meth­ods)? That is, what are they appro­pri­ate and useful for?

3) What to research? Why research something?

• a) How to devise effec­tive research ques­tions and hypotheses?
• b) How to effec­tively moti­vate research questions?

4) How to use quan­ti­ta­tive & sci­en­tific meth­ods prop­erly, care­fully & effectively?

• a) Experimental design: How to design an effec­tive exper­i­ment? What does effec­tive mean?
• b) Descriptive sta­tis­tics: How to present data effec­tively? What does effec­tive mean?
• c) Inferential sta­tis­tics: What can you con­clude from quan­ti­ta­tive data? Why? What are your chances of being wrong? How do you decide which sta­tis­ti­cal meth­ods to use? How to apply them prop­erly? How to do this in a given sta­tis­ti­cal analy­sis software?

5) How to com­mu­ni­cate all that effec­tively and scholarly?

6) How to crit­i­cally eval­u­ate and dis­cuss the qual­ity of quan­ti­ta­tive / sci­en­tific research (of your­self and others)?

"What's in it for me"?

Practically speak­ing, engag­ing in this course will (hope­fully) enable you to

• no longer fear sta­tis­tics (in case you ever might have ;-), but instead appre­ci­ate and enjoy the beauty and craft of rig­or­ous sci­en­tific research
• design, con­duct, ana­lyze, write up, present, and dis­cuss your own quan­ti­ta­tive (or mixed-methods) research projects
• tackle your own thesis research projects suc­cess­fully, by having the most pow­er­ful sci­en­tific research tool­box at your fingertips
• have enough skills to con­tinue learn­ing and apply­ing scientific/quantitative research meth­ods prop­erly (the goal of the course is to give you a solid basis in the basic research meth­ods and the skills to keep learn­ing and suc­cesss­fully apply­ing more advanced ones)

Textbooks & tutorials

• Field, A., & Hole, G. J. (2003). How to Design and Report Experiments. Sage Publications. ISBN: 0761973834 
• TBD: Open Learning Initiative Statistics (online learn­ing mod­ules, prob­a­bly with a $25.00 fee. Registration infos will be pro­vided in class / by email) might also be: Statistical Reasoning by CMU OLI (no-login link & out­line)

Statistics and JMP resources & links to video tutorials and online courses etc.

JMP & statistics short summaries and cheat-sheets from Bernhard

(Note: these are draft and work in progress, feed­back is welcome):

• t-tests and how to per­form them in JMP
• Hypothesis test­ing for cat­e­gor­i­cal vari­ables: Analyzing cat­e­gor­i­cal or fre­quency data in JMP (Chi²)
• ANOVA assump­tions & how to test them in JMP
• How to per­form non-parametric tests in JMP
• How to cal­cu­late effect sizes in JMP
• Independent mea­sures ANOVA in JMP (incl. assump­tion test and effect sizes)
• Experimental design and approaches cheat sheet from IAT802 (thanks to all the great stu­dent contributions!)

Bernhard’s first attempts to do short sta­tis­tics video tuto­ri­als for SPSS & JMP

Project presentations

On November 26^th, the 17 stu­dents in my grad course on “Quantitative Research Methods & Design (IAT802)” that I taught in Fall 2016 give their final 5:30-min project pre­sen­ta­tions in the SIAT research col­lo­quium at Simon Fraser University. Enjoy!

here’s the video record­ing of the whole ses­sion:

Here’s the list of speak­ers and topics

• Elgin McLaren:   Attention Retention: The effec­tive­ness of neu­ro­feed­back sys­tems for cueing sus­tained attention
• Jeff Ens: Music and the role of dimen­sional com­plex­ity in sim­i­lar­ity judgements
• Arron Ferguson: Choose Wrong, Someone Dies: Measuring Engagement with Ethical Choices and Character Consistency in Interactive Narrative
• Duc-Minh Pham: Body-based Navigation: A Promising Locomotion Technique in Immersive Virtual Environment.
• Ray Pan: “Split, Horizontal or Overlapped?”: Comparing Social Presence and Body Ownership in Shared Video Views for Long Distance Relationships
• Denise Quesnel:   Are you awed yet? Objective and sub­jec­tive indi­ca­tors of awe, using vir­tual real­ity content
• Mia Cole: Time to Relax: No effects to the stress response after short-term use of an EEG-based brain-computer interface.
• Maha El Meseery:   TBD (Will track­ing user inter­ac­tions during visual explo­ration helps improve their analy­sis efficiency? )
• Ted Nguyen Vo: Moving in a Box: A Visual Cue for Virtual Reality Locomotion
  Fatemeh Salehian Kia: Motive or Strategic Student: Comparing 3 Types of Visual Feedbacks on Students’ Performance with Different Learning Styles in Online Discussions
• Junwei Sun: Assessing Input Methods and Cursor Displays for 3D Positioning with HMDs
  Narges Ashtari: Exploring fac­tors which affect archi­tects design explo­ration struc­ture in CAD spaces
• Stephanie Wong: Easy A: assess­ing student’s abil­ity to cheat with smart­watch
  Abraham Hashemian: Leaning-Based 360 Locomotion Interfaces: How good are they for nav­i­ga­tion in Virtual Reality
• Serkan Pekcetin: Measuring the Effect of Binaural Audio on the Sense of Direction in Virtual Environments
• Xintian Sun: Where Was It? Evaluating Spatial Memory in Different Backgrounds from Static and Moving Viewpoints

Project presentations from Fall 2014 offering

On November 26^th 2014, the 9 stu­dents in my grad course on “Quantitative Research Methods & Design (IAT802)” that I taught in Fall 2014 gave their final 7-min project pre­sen­ta­tions in the SIAT research col­lo­quium at Simon Fraser University. Enjoy! I think the stu­dents did an amaz­ing job, quite proud of them! — for many it was their first sci­en­tific research project and presentation!

(alter­nate link)

Here’s the list of speak­ers and topics

• Alejandro:  Non-Expert Movement Observation Using Laban Movement Analysis
• Alex Kitson:  Individual fac­tors influ­enc­ing ori­en­ta­tion per­for­mance in vir­tual environments
• Jianyu Fan:  Groundtruthing and Validating the Soundscape Valence/Arousal Classification with Multiple Users
• William Li:  Validation of MotionCapture (MoCap) Labels in Movement
• Jason Procyk:  Video Feedback for Ice Hockey: Investigating the Effect on Shot Training
• Luciano Frizzera:
• Effectiveness and effi­ciency of time rep­re­sen­ta­tion on human spa­tial move­ment map visualization
• Srilekha Kirshnamachari Sridharan:  Association of Colors to Phoneme-Grapheme pairs.
• Kıvanç Tatar:  Empirical Evaluation of a Commercial Synthesizer Automatic Calibration System
• Arefin Mohiuddin:  Exploration of Parallel Alternatives in Design Tasks — The Effect on Task Completion Times

Project presentations from Fall 2013 offering

Here are the pre­sen­ters & talk titles:

Carolyn Pang    Evaluating the Usability of Desktop and Mobile Government Portals
Mirjana Prpa    Can an immer­sive dis­play enhance the expe­ri­ence of self-motion illu­sions in VR?
Sujoy Hajra    Evaluating EEG based mea­sures for lan­guage ther­apy assess­ment in stroke patients
Xiaolan Wang    Does pre­vi­ous con­tact with fund­ing orga­ni­za­tions affect the money com­mu­nity gar­dens get?
Emily C    Color’s effect on learn­ing symbol-sound rela­tion­ships
Ankit Gupta      Can seman­ti­cally labeled graphs help you find infor­ma­tion faster?
Xiao Zhang    Progressive or regres­sive visual inter­face design: com­par­ing user expe­ri­ence sup­ported by iOS 7 versus iOS 6
Ethan Soutar-Rau     It all started with a Penguin
Reese Muntean    Effects of Gender on Beer Preference
Sohail.Md    Melodic com­par­i­son in META-MELO system
Xin Tong    Comparison between two kinds of Virtual Reality dis­play: the Oculus Rift HMD & the Firsthand dis­play
Sanam Shirazi    Can we pre­dict stu­dents’ aca­d­e­mic per­for­mance from engage­ment in online learn­ing activ­i­ties?
Srecko Joksimovic The level of social pres­ence in online learn­ing com­mu­nity as a pre­dic­tor of stu­dents’ aca­d­e­mic per­for­mance
Jacqueline Jordan     Does vec­tion inten­sity differ between Virtual Reality dis­plays?

Project presentations from Fall 2012 offering

For the first time, stu­dents from the SIAT grad­u­ate course on “Quantitative Research Methods & Design (IAT802)” that I taught in Fall 2012 at SIAT gave their final 6-min project pre­sen­ta­tion pub­licly in the SIAT research col­lo­quium. Enjoy! I think the stu­dents did a won­der­ful job — for many it was their first sci­en­tific research project and presentation!

Jake Freiberg                Biomechanical Influences on Visually Induced Rotational Vection
Audrey Desjardins       Exploring Computer Mice Materials and Affective Responses
Jim Silvester                 The Effect of Viewpoint Jitter on Circular Vection in Virtual Reality
Nadya Calderon            Animation of Real-Time Series: Trends and Common Fate
Mehdi Karamnejad      The Effects of Walking on Galvonic Skin Response
Saeedeh Bayatpour      The Ability of Fusion in Three-Dimensional Autostereogram
Omid Alemi                   Are We Biased Against Computers’ Creativity?
Lisa Donaldson            The Effect of Contrast on Circular Vection When Viewed Within Virtual Reality

The last two pre­sen­ta­tions were recorded in out normal sem­i­nar room a few days later:

Jillian Warren             The Effect of Textual and Pictorial Representation on Learning Ability with Interactive Tangibles
Laura Lande              The Effects of Nursing Experience on Diagnosing Fetal Position

IAT 201: Human-Computer Interaction & Cognition

(taught 2008 — Fall 2012)

Course map and other information

Sample final project videos from previous course offerings

Many pre­vi­ous course project videos are avail­able at here or directly on youtube or vimeo. Below are some recent sample videos

(SFU Enrollment System; thanks: team 402, Fall 2012)

IAT 201 — SFU ENROLLMENT SYSTEM from Bruce Lui on Vimeo.

(Treadmill Redesign; thanks: team 403, Fall 2012)

Treadmil, Flexdeck Shock Absorption System (Life Fitness 95Ti) Redesign from Adam Lin on Vimeo.

(Cineplex Self-Ticketing Machine ReDesign; thanks: team 205, Spring 2012):

(Sony Reader; thanks: team 102, Spring 2012):

IAT 201 Final Video (Sony Reader) from aaron|lalau on Vimeo.

(Minitab redesign; thanks: team 205, Fall 2011):

[IAT201] Miniclip Redesign from Kim on Vimeo.

Roland dig­i­tal sam­pler re-design: (thanks: team 803, Spring 2011!)

iTunes re-design: Thanks: Team 605, Spring 2011!

here’s an older project video (before we started includ­ing the final user study results). Thanks: team thun­der­punch, fall 2009!)

IAT 812: Cognition, Learning and Collaboration

and the Craft of Research and Scientific Writing for Publication

(taught Spring 2009–2012)

Course map and other infor­ma­tion

Here’s a record­ing of the final 5-min stu­dent project pre­sen­ta­tions from the IAT812 course that I taught in Spring 2012 at SIAT. Enjoy!

Some of the papers that orig­i­nated in IAT812 that I taught from 2009 — 2012  were later pub­lished. Below are some of them (papers I didn’t co-author are not listed, sorry):

Published peer-reviewed papers based on my teaching of IAT812