Facilities and Resources

From technical studios to prototyping spaces, we utilize a variety of facilities while working on our creative and user-centered HCI research.

In addition to our department-wide HCII Facilities below, many HCII faculty have resources unique to their research in their dedicated lab spaces. View a list of those on our Centers and Labs page.

We also maintain resources for the greater learning science and ed tech community. These can be found under LearnLab Resources below.

Human-Computer Interaction Institute Facilities

The following facilities are reserved for HCII community members only:

Augmented Design Capability Studio

The Augmented Design Capability Studio is equipped with a comprehensive maker space (including an electronics workbench, woodworking tools, and hand tools), user study room, desktop-based car simulator, and advanced video recording setups for mobile field studies and studio-quality recording.

d.stable Lab

The d.stable Lab supports in context design, development, and testing of interactive spaces. It allows researchers to simulate environments where the context strongly influences how people engage with technology. The lab has previously functioned as a home, retail store, hospital waiting room, department of motor vehicles, doctor’s office, hotel reception, and a teenager’s bedroom. The lab allows rapid exploration of possible futures.

d.form Crafting and Fabrication Facility

d.form Crafting and Fabrication Facility is part of the d.stable Lab. It has crafting and fabrication tools for building handheld sized to room sized prototypes. These include a sewing machine, vinyl cutter, several 3D printers, laser cutter, CNC machine, table saw, chop saw, drill press, and hand tools. The main purpose of this facility is to support research at the HCII which requires fabrication or crafting. For information on access and use of this facility, please see the Facility Policy.

Future Interfaces Group's Electronics Prototyping Lab

This lab provides the HCII community with tools for electronics prototyping and debugging, as well as basic assembly of physical prototypes. A full suite of hand and power tools are available for use. An area for documenting prototypes on white and black backgrounds is also available.

MR Experimental Space

The MR Experimental Space is equipped with a 9 ft x 12 ft x 9 ft truss system, various Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality headsets (HTC Vive Pro, Varjo XR-3, Oculus Quest 2) and RGB-D cameras (Intel RealSense, Azure Kinect). It is used to develop and test new technologies in the space of Mixed Reality, and is maintained by the Augmented Perception Lab.

Center for Transformational Play

The Center for Transformational Play (CTP) supports the creation of games and playful experiences at Carnegie Mellon University. This lab area includes physical prototyping materials for low-fidelity mockups, computers and software for digital prototyping, a game library for designers to reference, and research materials related to games. CTP resources are available to members of the HCII community, as well as to colleagues from other CMU departments who work on games.

User Studies Laboratory

The multi-room User Studies Lab has been used for hundreds of investigations into the usability of new technology, the details of human interaction with technology, and the feasibility of new interaction techniques — including speech recognition, help systems, computer-aided instruction, human-robot interaction, and documentation and collaborative writing. The lab contains equipment for single-user laboratory and field recording of video data, and can also accommodate research into the performance of groups of people. Video, audio, and data-analysis software and equipment are available for collecting and analyzing data.

Wet Lab

The Morphing Matter Lab has a standard wet lab space with a fume hood to enable hazardous chemical handling. Access to this resource is limited to the HCII community only due to required safety training and limited capacity. Reach out to the PI for inquiry.

LearnLab Resources

We offer the following resources to the learning science community:

LearnSphere

LearnSphere is a community data infrastructure to support learning improvement online. Researchers can leverage user-contributed workflows and tools to perform various methods of analysis on their data. The community based tool repository allows researchers to improve existing tools and share their work with their team or the whole world. LearnSphere website

DataShop

DataShop, a LearnSphere resource, provides two main services to the learning science community: a central repository to secure and store research data, and a set of analysis and reporting tools, including the LearnSphere workflow tool. In support of other analyses, DataShop data can be exported in a tab-delimited format compatible with statistical software and other analysis packages. DataShop website

Cognitive Tutor Authoring Tools (CTAT)

With the Cognitive Tutor Authoring Tools (CTAT), non-programmers can create AI-based tutoring software. With this software, learners solve practice problems that can have multiple solution paths, with guidance from the software with each problem step, and with individualized mastery learning so every learner gets the right amount of practice. CTAT website

Online Learning Engineering Certificate Courses

Industry professionals in instructional design, learning science, and data science can gain expertise in a variety of self-paced 3 to 4-week CMU short courses, based on our highly-rated METALS curriculum. Each course culminates with a real-world project that lets learners immediately put what they learn into practice. Learning Engineering Certificate Courses