HCI lab

Hokkaido University

Our laboratory specializes in human-computer interaction; we design interactive systems from observations of people who use the digital devices in terms of a user-centered design approach and then we develop an actual working prototype. The advantage of our lab is the methods to understand people through user study and evaluation; we formally evaluate the working prototype to validate our research concept. We are focusing on a wide range of research topics, including interactive social robot and agent research (Human-Robot Interaction and Human-Agent Interaction), XR research such as Virtual/Augmented/Mixed Reality (VR/AR/MR/), user interface technology development as applied research of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine learning (ML) technique, and user experience and interaction design, which are essential for modern product design and development.

Students of our lab learn the fundamentals of human-computer interaction research after being assigned to the lab as undergraduates and working on their graduation research. Most of all students go on to graduate school for advanced study. If you are not a student of our department or our university, you have an opportunity to join our lab at this time; you will take an entrance exam of our graduate school and if you pass the exam successfully, you can join our lab. Graduate students will take a course on "Human-Computer Interaction," in which our professors teach the fundamentals of the HCI research method. Currently, the Human-Computer Interaction course is a part of Hokkaido Summer Institute, which is the largest summer school in Japan, and all lectures are given in English. We invite researchers to this HCI course from abroad every year and they will give lectures in collaboration with our professors.