interactive. media. research.
Corona virus pandemic information: Following university recommendations, we have suspended or moved online all public events (Open Fab Lab Tuesdays, Aachen Maker Meetup, Cocoaheads), and are working from home. You can reach us via email, phone, and Zoom. Our classes continue to take place online. (Last updated Apr 24, 2022)
Headed by Prof. Dr. Jan Borchers, we work in Human-Computer Interaction (HCI). Grounded in Computer Science, we develop and study new interaction theories, techniques, and systems in areas like personal digital fabrication and personal design, tangible, mobile, and wearable user interfaces, interactive textiles, multitouch tables and interactive surfaces, augmented reality, interaction with AI, and visual coding environments. Our goal is to make the Brave New World of interactive technologies useful by making it usable. Since starting in October 2003, we have become one of Germany's best-published research groups at CHI, the premier international academic conference in the field.
We're part of the Computer Science Department and the HCI Center at RWTH Aachen University, Germany's top-ranked University of Technology and one of Germany's Excellence Universities. Our group is an Endowed Chair of the German B-IT Foundation.
Our Recent CHI Contributions
We regularly present our work at ACM CHI, the world's premier conference on Human-Computer Interaction:
Shaping Textile Sliders:
An Evaluation of Form Factors and Tick Marks for Textile Sliders
Paper by Nowak et al., CHI '22
SoRoCAD:
A Design Tool for the Building Blocks of Pneumatic Soft Robotics
Poster by Brocker et al., CHI '22
The Scent of Collaboration:
Exploring the Effect of Smell on Social Interactions
Poster by Mehrotra et al., CHI '22
Flowboard:
How Seamless, Live, Flow-Based Programming Impacts Learning to Code for Embedded Electronics
Brocker et al., conditionally accepted at TOCHI
From Detectables to Inspectables:
Understanding Qualitative Analysis of Audiovisual Data
Paper by Subramanian et al., CHI '21
News & Events
- In our Multimodal Media Madness (M3) practical lab, our undergrads just wrapped up their 3-month PyBadge retro game programming projects. In particular, the featured project "Endless Nightmare" is pretty amazing. Check out their video trailer. The PyBadge is an embedded DIY retro gaming console from Adafruit. For performance, everything's coded in Arduino (C++) with Adafruit's Arcada library. Some installation instructions are in German, but Google Translate should do the trick. (Jul 11, 2022)
- For this year's "Helle Köpfe", 15 children from the region visited our lab and built simple robots using vibration motors and paper cups. (May 30, 2022)
- Our paper "Shaping Textile Sliders: An Evaluation of Form Factors and Tick Marks for Textile Sliders" was accepted at ACM CHI. (Apr 28, 2022)
- A journal paper on Flowboard, our flow-based-programming tool to learn embedded coding, was just accepted for publication in ACM TOCHI. (Apr 20, 2022)
- At this month's Aachen Maker Meetup, we are celebrating the 40th birthday of the Sinclair ZX Spectrum, the world's most successful home computer of the 80s, after the C64 (Apr 20, 2022).
- Our new learning cards (in German) that introduce 3D printing to makers are now available at your favorite bookseller — or as PDF for free. (Dec 1, 2021)
- Our Centre Guide app for iOS and Android, the official exhibition guide for the Centre Charlemagne, now also covers their temporary exhbition celebrating 150 years of RWTH Aachen University, which opened today. (Oct 29, 2021).
- For this year's Girls' and Boys' Day, we offered an online course about programming the wildly successsful Arduino microcontroller board. We were happy that we could provide a hardware programming experience to our highly motivated participants even though the event was online. (Apr 22, 2021)
- We supported the city library in Eschweiler during the 'Night of open libraries' by offering a CAD design course for beginners. (Mar 19, 2021)
- Our CHI'21 paper "From Detectables to Inspectables: Understanding Qualitative Analysis of Audiovisual Data" received an Honorable Mention Award, a distinction aimed at the top 5% of submissions to CHI, the premier international conference on Human–Computer Interaction. Congratulations Krishna and Johannes! (Mar 15, 2021)
- We supported ROCK YOUR LIFE! Aachen e.V. with their preparations for their digital winter festival by lasercutting sets of tangram games in our Fab Lab. (Dec 18, 2020)
- Our ARPen is the Day 1 surprise in the AR/VR in Education advent calendar. :)
- Prof. Borchers will be on a research sabbatical during the upcoming summer semester, from Apr 1 until Sep 30, 2021. We still offer most of our courses nevertheless.
- Our Centre Guide, the mobile audio guide for Aachen's Centre Charlemagne museum, is now in the iOS App Store and the Google Play Store, in time for the new exhibition on Charles V who was coronated exactly 500 years ago on Oct 23, 1520. (Oct 8, 2020)
- Prof. Borchers holds a series of usability workshops for RWTH Aachen University's SAP development team. This is part of our initiative to improve the usability of RWTH's software systems. (Sep 23, 2020).
- RWTH is Germany's #1 in Computer Science Research. (Aug 26, 2020)
- Earlier news & events...
Usability for Everybody in 18 Minutes
Teaching Summer 2022
Current Topics in HCI
Designing Interactive Systems 2
FLApp
FLApp, our mobile Future Lab Aachen App for iOS and Android that launched in 2017, takes you on a walking tour through Aachen's inner city. But instead of historical facts, you'll find out about the latest discoveries and inventions made by engineers and scientists at each location, some using Augmented Reality.
Interested in HCI?
- Jan's Top Ten list of HCI books
- What makes a good PhD student? (Jan, Jan 25, 2006)
- HCI Journals and their Impact Factors (Jan, Jan 30, 2006)
- Other HCI- and Media Computing-related groups at RWTH Aachen University
- Join our low-traffic HCI Announcements list to be informed about HCI-related events at our chair, at RWTH Aachen University and in the area.
Media Computing Group / Lehrstuhl Informatik 10 (Medieninformatik und Mensch–Computer–Interaktion) • Prof. Dr. Jan Borchers • RWTH Aachen University • Ahornstr. 55 • 2nd floor • Room 2208 • 52074 Aachen • Germany • +49 (0)241 80-21051 • Contact & Directions
| File | Description | File size | Downloads | Last modified |
|---|---|---|---|---|
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| bendDesk_logo.png | 33 kB | 35711 | 2010-11-11 15:28 | |
| codegraffitilogo.png | 15 kB | 41605 | 2010-09-10 15:38 | |
| stacksplorer_logo.png | 22 kB | 40871 | 2010-09-10 14:15 | |
| mudpad_logo.png | 40 kB | 23555 | 2010-09-10 14:15 | |
| pinstripe_logo.png | 12 kB | 40841 | 2010-09-10 14:15 | |
| madgets_logo.png | 20 kB | 44024 | 2010-09-10 14:15 | |
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| Folie.pdf | 4375 kB | 27851 | 2008-05-09 16:28 | |
 DRAGON Thumbnail.swf | Flash animation of DRAGON | 374 kB | 51323 | 2008-03-04 12:09 |
| ankuendigung.pdf | 68 kB | 25250 | 2008-01-02 11:35 |