Research projects in Information Technology

This project could suit a candidate with a background in the socio-technical area of IM or IT, or could be tackled from a range of technical perspectives.

One example of the kind of work a suitable candidate could undertake is in support of the NEED collaboration - which at the Australian end is being run out of FIT. In the NEED setting, questions of inequity in healthcare and wellness act as the starting point for considering digital health opportunities and solutions. 

Contemporary filmmakers and visual artists alike are embracing the potential of immersive digital technology – such as Augmented and Virtual Reality – to tell stories in powerful, new and affective ways. By effectively breaking the dictatorship of the frame that has defined the representational form of the moving image for the past 150 years, VR introduces a new paradigm for cinematic expression and viewing experience. This challenge marks a transformational moment in the evolution in the craft of “immersive storytelling”.

Museums are – and have always been – mixed reality spaces par excellence. Today, digital technologies extend the ways in which the wealth of material culture they contain can be interpreted and exhibited, presenting new and (previously) unimaginable ways of bringing their stories to life.

Technologies emerge from a society’s cultural imagination, sparking new ways to imagine the future. Today, Artificial Intelligence (AI) – as the technical capability of a system ‘to correctly interpret external data, to learn from such data, and to use those learnings to achieve specific goals and tasks through flexible adaptation’ [1] – is formed into virtually any digital system that we draw upon to interact with each other and the world around us.

This project explores the role of technology in facilitating playful eating experiences, developing a novel understanding of how interactive technology can – and should – be designed to promote positive eating experiences. 

The rise of technology that supports a partnership between user and computer highlights an opportunity for a new era of “human-computer integration”, contrasting the previously dominant paradigm of computers functioning as tools.

There is an opportunity to prototype interactive muscle memory systems and study their use in order to understand what designers can learn from remembering activities that involve the active human body in regard to designing interactive systems. 

There is an opportunity to prototype digital water play systems and examine users’ aquatic body-environment interactions to derive an understanding of digital technology’s opportunities to facilitate novel bodily water play interactions in-water, on-water and underwater. 

With drones getting smaller and smaller, we regard them as physical pixels that can be placed anywhere in space, allowing us to experience digital content in the physical world in novel playful ways.

There is an opportunity to enrich indoor rock-climbing or bouldering through interactive technology. This project builds on prior work and combines bouldering with Hololens and motion capture.