Our undergraduate students are the key players in the strategy devised to accomplish the proposed project.
We intend to expose the students to a combination of different technologies: 1) sensing technologies specific to a particular field of engineering; and 2) technologies pertinent to augmented reality implementations. The students will focus on the occurrence of hazards in their field of specialization and the possibility of using augmented reality to enhance the human sensory ability to detect these hazards. Finally, we will guide the students, organized in small research teams, through generation, implementation, and professional presentation of their ideas.
Another portion of the funding requested for this project will be used for undergraduate student stipends. These one-semester stipends will be alloted through a University-wide competitive process.
Our primary role in this project is one of mentor-ship and coordination. We intend to extract the maximum of our students' ingenuity by immersing them in a creative environment consisting of independent study, their engineering courses, and challenging and practical research tasks. The proposed research projects will be closely coordinated with the capstone design course in student's major field of interest and Eng 477, the course on the principles of virtual reality. The competitive element in our advisory role will come from the students freedom to choose their advisors by choosing among the different opportunities and ideas we, the faculty, propose.