The GigaPixel Display Laboratory is hosted by Virginia Tech's Department of Computer Science and the Center for Human-Computer Interaction (CHCI).  This NSF-funded facility contains reconfigurable ultra-high resolution displays, totaling approximately 200 million pixels, one of the highest resolutions in the world.

The h.Lab investigates the phenomenology of mediated life.

 The LIVE lab studies the design, development, and evaluation of information visualizations.  Information visualizations are interactive visual representation of abstract data that enable people to effectively explore and understand large quantities of complex information.

Notification systems attempt to deliver current, important information to the user in an efficient and effective manner. Examples of familiar notification systems include instant messaging systems, system and user status updates, email alerts, and news and stock tickers. With the popularity of these systems skyrocketing in recent years, our group explores the effects of incoming notifications on ongoing computing tasks, creating models for their design, implementation, and evaluation. Please feel free to contact us with questions or comments about our work.

The POET lab engages in research of real-world technology projects that promote equity and excellence in K-12 math and science classrooms and university engineering education, explores systems (especially Tuple Space-based) to support complex human coordination, lies in the realms of computer-supported cooperative work (CSCW) and computer-supported cooperative learning (CSCL), evaluates handheld, tablet, and large-screen computing, and contributes to the issues of social attention and technology.

Social computing is the study of the social use and impact of information technology, and the study of information technology designed specifically for social purposes, such as interpersonal and group communication, discussion, and social interaction (e.g., electronic mail, instant messenger, discussion tools, blogging, and social websites, such as Friendster, Facebook, and MySpace). It draws on multiple disciplines, including sociology, social psychology, political science, communication studies, and computer science.

ThirdLabThird Lab provides the intellectual home for two HCI lab groups - Deborah Tatar's POET Lab and Steve Harrison's h.Lab .  While each of the labs have different projects and ask different kinds of questions, both are fundmentally phenomenologically situated.  The name comes from the seminal paper by Harrison, Tatar and Sengers, The Third Paradigm which organizes the intellectual landscape of HCI into "classical human factors" (e.g. critical incidents), "classical cognitivism" (human information processing model, GOMS, KLM, and other quantifiable performance-oriented systems), and "phenomologically situated" (semiotic design, sociality, ethnography, affect, activity theory, cultural probes, etc.) "Third" also refers to the semeiotic system of Charles Sandes Peirce in which a "sign" is made up of the representation, the thing refered to by the representation, and a third thing -- the idea in the mind that connects the two.  Third Lab meets Wednesday afternoons.  

The Vision Interfaces and Systems Laboratory is engaged in research along three themes: advanced human computer interaction, computer vision, and medical imaging. Ongoing projects in VISLab are: multimodal human-computer interaction, multimodal meeting analysis of planning meetings, conversational interaction, vision-based hand gesture interaction; vision-based gaze tracking, multimedia databases; automated segmentation of video; registration of aerial video/photography from Unmanned Aerial Vehicles, extraction of the neurovascular tree from multimodal medical images; and, three-dimensional alignment of multimodal medical images. The fundamental vision of the VISLab is that Computer Science and Engineering, in general, and HCI and Computer Vision, in particular, have an important role to play in a vast array of arts and sciences. Most of the research in the VISLab is collaborative with other fields. In return, the real challenges of these real projects enrich and focus our research.

From the desktop to stereo walls to the fully immersive environments, integrated information spaces can aid scientist's discovery and communication. Interactive visual analysis enables users to apprehend non-obvious information and relationships. We focus on the adoption of supercomputing and visual analysis tools to advance science, engineering, and education by effectively delivering heterogeneous information to networked multimedia platforms.