Moritz Alexander Messerschmidt
Student Assistant
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Info
I am studying computer science at the RWTH Aachen University and currently writing my master's thesis. The aim of the thesis is to extend Springlets by offering researchers as well as hapticans an intuitive haptic toolkit based on programmable Shape Memory Alloys. My thesis supervisors are Nur Al-huda Hamdan and Adrian Wagner.
Since WS2016 I have been working as student assistant for the Media Computing Group. I have mainly been involved in the Personal Photonics research project, funded by the Ministry of Science and Education (BMBF), within which we are developing our Haptic Vest together with our Haptic Toolkit and the ARPen.
My interests especially comprise haptics and intelligent user interfaces, along with the different areas of HCI and UX Design.
During my working time I usually can be found in the FabLab (room 2213) which is being led by Jan Thar
Projects
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Haptic Vest A vest which should "enable vision impaired users to experience their surroundings by vibratory actuation on the belly" (VibroVision Project). I developed the software for our Haptic Toolkit and am still maintaining our new prototypes of the Haptic Vest which we are carrying around and presenting at different exhibitions (see below). |
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Healthcare Makerthon 2018 Together with 'iServiceCall', our interdisciplinary team 'SpectralPals' has been awarded with the 'Follow Up Award' by Merck and Deutsche Telekom for the projects with the best business impact at the Healthcare Makerthon 2018. During the three weeks of prototyping madness, we took up the biosensing-challenge and developed a concept for a user friendly, non-invasive wearbable which allows monitoring 'critical values' for long-term clinical studies. |
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Front-of-Device Tactile Landmarks for Eyes-Free Absolute Indirect Force Touch Nowadays, smartphones are replacing a variety of tools like presenters or remote controls for smart televisions. In these cases the users' eyes are focusing on a distant screen while the interaction remains on the smartphones touch display. During the CTHCI18 course we tried to overcome the problem of missing haptic feedback on the touch-surface by taking advantage of force-touch and porting tactile landmarks (introduced by Hueber et al. 2015) to the front of the smartphone device. Our small user-study and statistical analysis showed that the transparent landmarks indeed can improve the users performance for target selection tasks on distant screens. |
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SOS Buddy - Easily Inform Friends and Family in an Emergency Situation During the practical course UCTD at Fraunhofer (FIT) we developed an emergency system comprising a small keychain pendant and a smartphone application, allowing to easily dispatch a notification message in case of an emergency. The development covered an in-depth user-centered design process in which we applied common UX Design principles and techniques. After understanding the actual context of use, we iteratively evaluated, and incrementally improved our low-, mid- and high-fidelity prototypes based on the users needs. |
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Badge Maker (Bachelor Thesis) My bachelor thesis has been about "Developing an Easy-to-use System to Design and Build Illuminated Acrylic Name Tags for Children" which covered the development process of a CNC milling machine with a user friendly interface; enabling unexperienced people to gather first experiences with the personal fabrication technology. |
Attended Conferences
UIST 2018 - Berlin, Germany
AI4U 2018 - Munich, Germany
atec 2017 - Aachen, Germany
Attended Exhibitions
We attended several exhibitions as exhibitor, presenting our work and projects together with the Make Light Photonics Research Initiative.
Medica 2018 - Dusseldorf, Germany
Cebit 2018 - Hannover, Germany
Open House Event of BMBF 2017 - Berlin, Germany
Hannover Messe 2017 - Hannover, Germany
LaserWorld of Photonics 2017 - Munich, Germany
MakerFaires (2016-2018) - Rome, Berlin, Hannover, Stuttgart
Publications
- Moritz Alexander Messerschmidt, Sachi Muthukumarana, Nur Al-Huda Hamdan, Adrian Wagner, Ham Zhang, Jan Borchers and Suranga Chandima Nanayakkara. ANISMA: A Prototyping Toolkit to Explore Haptic Skin Deformation Applications Using Shape-Memory Alloys. In ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction, pages 34, number 3, January 2022.
- Moritz Messerschmidt. SkinPlot: A Programmable Thin and Soft Skin-drag Display Using Shape MemoryAlloys. Master's Thesis, RWTH Aachen University, Aachen, December 2019.
- Moritz Messerschmidt. Badge Maker Developing an Easy-to-use System to Design and Build Illuminated Acrylic Name Tags for Children. Bachelor's Thesis, RWTH Aachen University, Aachen, April 2017.