This page contains an archive of the past five years of Directed Research Groups led by Research Scientist Elin Björling. View her currently offered DRGs »
Autumn 2025 - Winter 2026
Designing User Experiences in VR using AI Facilitation
Directed Research Group - Fall & Winter Quarter
3 Credits/Quarter
This project will include both design, development, and research activities so we are looking for a broad range of student skills and backgrounds to help us inform this project. We are particularly interested in students with experience in: physical and digital prototyping for VR, VR interaction design, and/or development in Unity or VR prototyping software.
ImproVRise is a small startup exploring a unique VR experience for neurodiverse children and young adults. This DRG will focus on exploring the following questions:
- Design: How might we translate a real-world, facilitated creative experience into a successful, automated VR exercise?
- Research: How do participants experience creative interactions led by an automated facilitator?
Using a human-centered design approach we will use existing prototyping and AI tools and resources such as ChatGPT, to explore how to prototype an automated VR facilitator to lead activities in VR. We will design and test this prototype with real-world users.
This project will likely continue into Winter quarter so Fall students may have an opportunity to continue the work in Winter quarter.
Autumn 2022 - Winter 2023
Hearing Aid Simulator DRG
Co-directed by Drs. Elin Björling and Daniella Kim
What would it be like to put yourself in the shoes of someone with hearing loss? One of the leading causes of kids' low hearing aid compliance is that sometimes grownups and other kids just don't understand what it's like to wear a hearing aid.
This DRG, a collaboration between Seattle Children's Hospital and HCDE, aims to build empathy for those who wear hearing aids by designing and early prototyping a VR hearing aid simulator for people that commonly interact with kids with hearing loss. This might include caregivers, the cafeteria lunch person, siblings, teachers, medical professionals, and sports coaches.
We'll find out what kids with hearing aids really want us to know, and using human-centered design methods, figure out what a helpful VR solution might look like.
Spring 2022
Project CARES: Virtual Reality to Support Teen Mental Health Facilitators
- Elin Björling, HCDE, bjorling@uw.edu
- Jin-Ha Lee, iSchool, jinhalee@uw.edu
Background
Last year, we conducted a virtual reality project with the Seattle Public Library to co-design virtual reality environments intended to support teen mental health. You can learn more about the project here.
Now that the project is over, we have lots of rich data from several design sessions with teens and artifacts from their designs. We are analyzing these qualitative data for themes in our attempt to best describe the process. We aim to answer the research question: What was the experience of teens engaged in co-design to develop a VR environment intended to support teen mental health?
Our Focus
During spring quarter, we are looking for students experienced or interested in qualitative analysis. We will be conducting a collaborative, rapid, qualitative analysis. We will then be writing a research paper to describe these data. Students are welcome to work on the analysis only or to also contribute to the research paper.
Spring 2022
Project EMAR
Adolescents are subject to high levels of stress in their lives, resulting from school, relationships, and family life. Not surprisingly, school stress is most commonly reported as the biggest source of stress for teens. Therefore, accurately measuring and intervening to reduce teen stress is imperative to support this vulnerable population.
Social robots are being used to help other populations, such as the elderly and young children. However, there is very little research on either the experience of stress in teens, or the interactions between teens and robots. This presents a unique research opportunity in the field of human-robot interaction (HRI).
Our interdisciplinary team is working on three projects for Fall quarter: (1) design and development of robotic movement and haptics interfaces, (2) implementation and testing of intuitive social robot programming tools, and (3) building out and launching a website for data collection from teens and visualization of collected data.
The team is led by Elin Björling (Human-Centered Design and Engineering) and Maya Cakmak, (Computer Science and Engineering). For more information about Project EMAR, see our blog at blogs.uw.edu/EMAR.