The time has come again at University to start thinking about projects for the year. My project takes a different spin this time round, it has to be researched based (with a big stint of readings to do before producing a proposal) and will be conducted over the Summer for 14 weeks.

The project I'm undertaking is entitled 3D Sonification with Gestures. It is a self proposed project which myself and Steve Brewster came up with, and thus Steve will be supervising the project.

I wrote a small blurb (below) which presents the main idea of the project, which was then submitted to the projects coordinator (who this year happens to be David Watt) and it was accepted.

There has been a lot of work over recent years into the use of gestures with computers, work in this area continues and is constantly being integrated with different technologies and other types of interactions to create new and more sophisticated interactions between humans and computers. The project proposed here is to combine gestures with sonification on a handheld device such as a PDA for an application such as the browsing and selection of music through the use of 3D spacial audio. The research would study the effectiveness of use of 3D spacial audio for the selection of items which are placed around a user at different angles and distances, the study would specifically look into the way in which users would use such a system and any possible implications in the area of handheld/mobile devices.

My project proposal has to be finished and in for the 2nd May and the whole project and dissertation finished for the 11th September. Hopefully I'll get a fair bit of reading done over Christmas (but is that really likely?).
- Chris