New project creates 'first-ever traveling studio for indigenous co-design of spatial interfaces'

Associate Professor Dan Keefe from Computer Science & Engineering and Professor Vincente Diaz from American Indian Studies have been funded to create the ‘first-ever traveling studio for indigenous co-design of spatial interfaces.’

The project ‘Mixed Reality Spatial Interaction for Diverse Communities’ aims to get technology into community hands while accounting for pandemic restrictions. This is being accomplished through method modifications that allow scaffolding to be conducted virtually using zoom and web platforms and where community members may participate from their own homes. Rather than deploying a classroom-like model of traveling hardware, the investigators will shift to a “traveling set of co-design ‘backpacks’, where the intention will be for each family participating in the virtual workshops to receive a backpack kit for authoring interactive Indigenous XR experiences.”