The Media Computing Group at RWTH Aachen University


interactive. media. research.


The Media Computing Group, headed by Prof. Dr. Jan Borchers, conducts research in Media Computing and Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) beyond today's graphical user interface and desktop metaphor. Grounded in Computer Science, we develop and study new interaction theories, techniques, and systems in the areas of interaction with audio and video streams, ubiquitous computing environments, multitouch tables and interactive surfaces, tangible and wearable user interfaces, Physical Computing, personal digital fabrication, user interfaces for software development, and HCI design patterns. Our goal is to make the Brave New World of interactive technologies useful by making it usable. An overview of our research approach and research directions can be found here.

We're part of the Computer Science Department at RWTH Aachen University, Germany's top-ranked University of Technology and one of Germany's nine Elite Universities. Our group is an endowed chair by the German B-IT Foundation, and we also teach in the MSc in Media Informatics program at the Bonn-Aachen International Center for Information Technology (B-IT Center). We started in October 2003, and have since become Germany's best-published research group at ACM CHI, the premier international conference in the field.

We are a member of the RWTH UMIC Excellence Cluster in Ultra High-Speed Mobile Information and Communication and the eHealth and Brain|Concept|Writing research groups in the HumTec Center, all funded by the DFG, the German National Science Foundation through its Excellence Initiative.

We offer several courses in Human-Computer Interaction. In this area of specialization, you learn how people interact with computers and technology, and how computer science can open up new ways of interacting with audio, video, and other types of information. For more information please refer to the specialization information for Media Computing and HCI.

Watch a short introduction of our group.

Our presentations at CHI 2012


Understanding Flicking on Curved Surfaces (Paper) Fly: Studying Recall, Macrostructure Understanding, and User Experience of Canvas Presentations (Paper) HoloDesk: Direct 3D Interactions with a Situated See-Through Display (Paper)
by Völker et al. by Lichtschlag et al. by Hilliges et al.


Diskplay (Note / Interactivity) DragLocks: Handling Temporal Ambiguities in Direct Manipulation Video Navigation (Note) Evaluating the Benefits of Real-time Feedback in Mobile Augmented Reality with Hand-held Devices (Note)
by Heller et al. by Karrer et al. by Liu et al.


Canvas Presentations in the Wild (Case Study) Blaze: Supporting Two-phased Call Graph Navigation in Source Code (Work in Progress) Text Entry on Interactive Tabletops Using Transparent Physical Keyboards (Workshop Paper)
by Lichtschlag et al. by Krämer et al. by Weiss et al.


Direct Manipulation and the Third Dimension: A Design Space for Co-Planar Dragging on 3D Displays (Workshop Paper)
by Möllers et al.



Our presentations (and an app) at UIST 2011


Stacksplorer (Paper) FingerFlux (Paper) UIST 2011 Conference (App)
by Karrer et al. by Weiss et al. by Diehl



Our presentations at CHI 2011

Usability for Everybody in 18 Minutes: Prof. Borchers' TEDx Talk




News & Events

  • From Apr 1 to Sep 30, Prof. Borchers will be on a research sabbatical in the U.S. and not available for teaching, meetings, or exams. Only Designing Interactive Systems II, the M4 Multimodal Media Madness undergraduate lab and the Media Computing Project graduate lab will take place, with some minor limitations.
  • We offer an Interactive Fashion Workshop in our Fab Lab during this year's Girls' Day event on April 26. Contact René for details. (Feb 12, 2012)
  • National Science TV magazine Galileo on the PRO7 channel reports on our experiments in printing food in 3D (Feb 9, 2012).
  • Prof. Borchers speaks on Personal Fabrication and Personal Design at the 18. Handelsblatt-Tagung, Munich (Jan 25, 2012).
  • Project MACS acquires 180,000 € of research funding to create the control bridge of the future for large maritime vessels (Dec 12, 2011)
  • 2,500 downloads of iEat Mobile, our free Mensa menu app for the iPhone and Mac (Nov 30, 2011)
  • Simon Voelker, Malte Weiss, Chat Wacharamanotham and Prof. Jan Borchers receive best note award at ITS 2011 for Dynamic Portals (Nov 16, 2011)
  • Prof. Borchers speaks on "Making Things Usable" at the TEDx Conference in Belgium (Nov 7, 2011).
  • REXplorer, our 2007 locative city game for Regensburg, was placed into the Computer Game Museum Berlin (Nov 2, 2011).
  • Malte Weiss, Chat Wacharamanotham, Simon Voelker and Prof. Jan Borchers receive award at ACM UIST 2011 for FingerFlux (Oct 18, 2011)
  • Check out our Fab Lab hands-on demo booth at the ErstInfoTag, the university's orientation day for high school students (Abiturienten). (July 2, 2011)
  • dorkbot Aachen turns 2! This monthly meeting of artists, designers, and geeks "doing strange things with electricity" was initiated by our chair with the help of many volunteers in 2009. Thanks everybody, and check out the video!
  • We are co-hosting the two-day workshop Werkzeug - Denkzeug on transmedia processes in creative design thinking with Prof. Thomas Schmitz from the architecture department (Feb 11-12, 2011)

Interested in HCI?





Created by system. Last Modification: Friday 27 of April, 2012 11:53:45 by kraemer.

Media Computing Group at RWTH Aachen

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